Former Fellows

Daniel A. Barber is an architectural historian analyzing affinities between the history of architecture and the emergence of environmentalism in the 20th century.

Etienne Benson is a historian of the environmental sciences with a particular interest in the field practices of late twentieth-century conservation biology.

Current Position: Research Assistant, Department of Statistics, Harvard University 

Nathan Black is a political scientist interested in the future relationship between climate change and violent civil conflict.

Gil Bohrer is an atmospheric physicist who focuses on atmosphere-biosphere-hydrosphere interactions.

Bill Boos is an atmospheric physicist working to understand the fundamental processes responsible for variations in tropical climate over a broad range of time scales.

Rebecca Case is a microbial ecologist studying the effects of bacterial-algal interactions on the marine sulfur cycle and on climate change more broadly.

Tim Cronin is a climate scientist interested in the interactions between clouds, sea ice, and severe storms in a warmer Arctic.

Joseph Cullen is an economist who studies the interaction between government regulation, business decisions, and the environment.

Susan Cameron Devitt is an ecologist and conservation biologist who studies how climate change shapes patterns of biodiversity.

Nicole Smith Downey has examined the uptake of molecular hydrogen by soils and will work on an integrated model of the terrestrial biogeochemical cycle of mercury.

Sebastian Eastham is an environmental scientist interested in the transport and impacts of pollutants and trace species over long distances through the atmosphere.

Emily V. Fischer is an atmospheric chemist interested in how air pollutants are transported around the globe and how the atmosphere’s self-cleansing capacity will respond to climate change.

Chris Golden is an ecologist and epidemiologist interested in the interface of ecosystem service provisioning and human health, specifically in the context of global trends in biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformation.

Pedram is a fluid dynamicist interested in climate dynamics and in particular the effect of climate change on extreme weather events.

Evan Hepler-Smith is a historian of science who studies the management of data and information in the chemical sciences and chemical regulation.

Evan Herrnstadt is an economist interested in the design and performance of energy and natural resource markets.

Garth Heutel is an economist who studies the dynamic interactions between environmental policies and economic issues.

Peter Huybers is an expert in ice ages and global climate change. Peter is currently a Professor in the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Valeriy Ivanov is a hydrologist interested in how climate and topography affect water, energy, and vegetation dynamics in natural landscapes. In September 2007, Valeriy joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor.

Rafael Jaramillo is a solid state physicist who works to develop sources of energy for our economy that are sufficient, safe, and renewable.

Alex Johnson is a physicist who will use his experimental and theoretical skills to design, build, and test a new generation of fuel cells that might be used to power portable electronics or cars.

Christopher Jones is a historian interested in the intersections between energy, technology, and the environment. He is the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard, 2014).

Melissa Kemp is an evolutionary biologist who uses the fossil record and historical data to investigate species responses to global change phenomena.

Jacob Krich is a theoretical condensed matter physicist interested in the quantum mechanical properties of materials at the nanoscale, and especially on applications of these properties to clean energy science.

Brian Lander employs textual, archaeological and paleoecological sources to study the human impact on the environment in ancient China.

Beth Landis is a materials chemist who is interested in applying surface chemistry to solar energy collection and storage.

Jessica LaRocca is an environmental toxicologist interested in how exposures to endocrine disruptors during pregnancy can influence development before and after birth.

Chiara Lo Prete is an energy economist who studies issues involved in the design and regulation of electricity markets.

Francis Ludlow is a historical climatologist studying the long neglected documentary record of annalistic and chronicle sources compiled in Ireland from the fifth to the seventeenth centuries AD, with respect to their rich evidence for the occurrence of historic meteorological extremes, natural hazards and their impacts upon medieval Irish society and the biosphere.

Dan Madigan is a marine ecologist interested in the interaction between pelagic ecology, contaminant transfer in food webs, fisheries, and anthropogenic environmental change.

Laura Jane Martin is a historian and ecologist who studies the cultural and political dimensions of ecological management.

Kaighin McColl is a hydrologist who studies the terrestrial water cycle and its coupling with the atmosphere.

Danielle Medek is an ecophysiologist, with interests in medicine, plant ecophysiology and global change.

Madhava Meegaskumbura is an evolutionary biologist focusing on understanding species extinction and how best to construct conservation strategies for endangered species in biodiversity hotspots.

Nathan Mueller is an applied ecologist who studies how agricultural systems influence – and are influenced by – global environmental change.

Esther Mwangi, a native of Kenya, is a political scientist whose broad research interests concern the role of institutions (particularly property rights) in fostering sustainable natural resource management and improving local livelihoods.

Prineha Narang is a physicist and material scientist interested in the theoretical fundamentals of nanoscale energy transfer.

Zoe Nyssa studies the emergence and contemporary practices of conservation biology in order evaluate their impact globally on endangered species.

Gillian Osborne is a literary scholar interested in nineteenth-century American and Romantic literature, the history of popular botany, and contemporary ecopoetics.

Jisung Park is an economist studying how climate change impacts economic productivity and human health.

Fabien Paulot is an atmospheric chemist who is interested in the interplay between the biosphere and the composition of the atmosphere.

David Romps is a string theorist with a deeper interest in global climate change.

Kelsey Sakimoto is a chemist interested in the sustainable production of fertilizer and beneficial soil microorganisms through solar energy for use in modern agriculture.

Mauricio Santillana is an applied mathematician and physicist with a passion for getting involved in multi-disciplinary research projects aimed at understanding the impact of human activities on our environment as well as global climate change.

Eduardo Souza Rodrigues is an economist interested in the causes of the deforestation in the Amazon and in the costs and effectiveness of policies that promote conservation.

Alexander (Zan) Stine is a climate scientist interested in how to separate natural climate variability from human-induced climate change in the observational record.

Jenny Suckale is a geophysicist who studies the dynamics of multiphase flow in natural systems ranging from glacial beds to volcanic conduits.

Jin Suntivich is a material scientist interested in understanding surface-molecule interaction from materials science's structure-property relation principles and how such understanding can lead to a rational design of novel energy conversion and storage materials.

Giuseppe Torri is a theoretical physicist interested in different aspects of atmospheric convection, with particular reference to entrainment and how aerosols are removed from the atmosphere through convective precipitation.

Rich Wildman is an environmental engineer who is interested in the movement and chemical reaction of contaminants in drinking water supplies, especially those that pass through reservoirs.

Roxanne Willis is a scholar of American environmental history and literature. She will use her fellowship to write a scholarly book intended to reach a broad non-scholarly audience: Alaska and the American Environmental Imagination.

Charles G. Willis is an evolutionary ecologist interested in the impacts of climate change on plant biodiversity in North America.

Alex Wissner-Gross is a condensed matter physicist whose broad research interests concern the science and technology of programmable media, with a recent focus on the intersection of computation, energy, and the environment.

Hillary Young is a community ecologist interested in cascading effects of wildlife decline and landuse change, particularly as they effect human health and well-being.

Yige Zhang is a geochemist interested in understanding how the Earth evolved chemically, and using various geochemical tools to study climate change of the geological past.

Ling Zhang is a historian studying the environmental and economic history of medieval northern China, with particular emphasis on the environmental problems associated with natural disasters and economic decline in traditional agricultural society.

Shengwei Zhu is an environmental scientist interested in the control of thermal comfort and air quality in indoor environments, where people usually spend over 95% of their lifetime.