ENVIRONMENTAL FELLOWS PROGRAM
Environmental Fellows at Harvard
The University Center for the Environment has created the Environmental Fellows program to enable recent doctorate recipients to use and expand Harvard's extraordinary resources to tackle complex environmental problems.
Requirements, fellowship terms and the 2007 application can be found here.
The 2006 Environmental Fellows at Harvard
Their research over the next two years will focus on developing new materials for fuel cells, understanding climate dynamics and ice ages, the flow of mercury in the environment, the distribution of vegetation in arid landscapes, conservation biology in California, and the role of Alaska in America 's environmental imagination. As a group, they will enhance environmental scholarship at Harvard and help tie together many of the University's academic departments and graduate schools. They are the first seven post-doctoral Environmental Fellows at Harvard, announced on May 3, 2006 by the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
“Each of the Environmental Fellows has demonstrated enormous talent and potential in his or her field,” said Daniel P. Schrag, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of the Center for the Environment. “From a large field of applicants from around the globe, the Center selected these seven because of their achievements to date and the likely impact of their research on scholarship at Harvard and on environmental problems confronting the planet.”
Each of the post-doctoral fellows will work for two years with a member of the Harvard faculty on a research project related to the environment. The fellows will work in the labs and offices of their hosts and convene frequently at the Center for the Environment for academic and social activities.
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Peter Alagona |
Peter Alagona received his PhD in history, with emphases in environmental history and the history of science, from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. Previously, Peter had received a B.A. in history from Northwestern University, an M.A. in geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. in history from UCLA.
Peter's research focuses on the cultural and political histories of ecology and the related life, environmental, and conservation sciences. He has published a wide variety of articles and reviews on these topics, in journals such as Ecology, Space and Culture, Bioscience, Environmental History, The Professional Geographer, Conservation Biology, and the Journal of the History of Biology. He also comes to Harvard with an extensive pedagogical record, including teaching assistantships in history and geography, a teaching fellowship in environmental science, lectureships in geography and earth science, and four summers co-leading environmental studies field courses in California 's High Sierra.
As an Environmental Fellow Peter will be working with Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, at the Kennedy School of Government. His primary goal over the next two years will be to convert his dissertation, on the history of biodiversity conservation in California, into a book. Whereas his graduate work focused rather narrowly on a few key case studies, his book will provide one of the first truly regional histories of American biodiversity conservation. Since debates over biodiversity conservation so often involve issues of land use, he plans to reframe his project to better understand how biological species—like the Mojave desert tortoise, valley oak, and Delhi Sands flower-loving fly—came to represent not only individual living beings and populations of organisms, but also the land itself.
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Nicole Smith Downey |
Nicole Smith Downey has examined the uptake of molecular hydrogen by soils and will receive her Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering this summer from the California Institute of Technology. She will start work in the fall on an integrated model of the terrestrial biogeochemical cycle of mercury.
Nicole received a B.S. in environmental biology, summa cum laude, from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, in 2001. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Morris K. Udall Scholar. At Caltech, she earned an M.S. in environmental science and engineering in 2003, having been named an Institute Fellow and an EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellow. Nicole has also participated in research at the University of Alaska 's Toolik Lake Research center, the Bilsa Biological Reserve in Ecuador, and the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts.
Nicole's thesis had two parts. She developed a technique utilizing microwave satellite data to detect when soil freezes and thaws and used that tool to measure changes in the length of the growing season across the arctic. She also created the first global model explaining how soil takes up molecular hydrogen based on moisture and temperature responses she measured in the lab. This model describes how environmental variability controls the uptake of hydrogen by soils, and was combined with an atmospheric chemistry model to describe the role of soils in the atmospheric budget of H 2.
As an Environmental Fellow, Nicole will work with Professor Daniel Jacob of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She describes her proposed research this way:
“Methylated mercury is a pollutant that bioaccumulates in the food chain and acts as a neurotoxin in higher organisms. Humans ingest mercury (Hg) primarily through seafood, and concerns have spawned government warnings about fish consumption across the globe. The global Hg cycle is poorly understood, limiting our ability to develop effective regulations of anthropogenic Hg emissions. A major uncertainty is the fate of Hg within terrestrial ecosystems, including rates of deposition and reemission from plants and soils and emissions from biomass burning. I propose to develop a mechanistic model of terrestrial Hg emissions that will be coupled with a global atmospheric and oceanic Hg model for a fully integrated simulation of the fate of Hg in the environment. This process-based model will enable me to determine the factors controlling Hg deposition and accumulation in ecosystems, and to examine changes in the terrestrial Hg cycle under different global change scenarios for the 21 st century.”
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Peter Huybers |
Read: Tilting at Ice Ages, Harvard Gazette article featuring Huybers' research.
Peter Huybers is an expert in ice ages and global climate change. He received his Ph.D. in climate physics and chemistry from MIT in 2004 and received a prestigious NOAA Postdoctoral Fellowship in climate and global change to continue his work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Geology and Geophysics Department.
Peter received his BS in physics from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1996. His subsequent military career included testing technologies to reduce fratricide at the Mounted Warfare Testbed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and training and leading a tank platoon as part of peace-keeping operations in Bosnia. He then taught high school physics in New Orleans for a year before receiving a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and starting his graduate studies at MIT.
Peter's thesis, “On the Origins of Ice Ages: Insolation Forcing, Age Models, and Nonlinear Climate Change,” won the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Prize as the best Ph.D. thesis completed in 2004 in MIT's Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate Change. Peter has published his work in Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, Quarternary Science Reviews, Paleoceanography and the Journal of Physical Oceanography.
Peter has been an occasional guest lecturer on statistical and paleoclimate topics at MIT and Woods Hole, and taught a course on abrupt climate change at MIT in 2005. He has also been active as a member of the Cambridge Climate Advisory Committee and the American Geophysical Union.
As an Environmental Fellow at Harvard, Peter will work with Professor Eli Tziperman of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (himself a Rossby Prize winner in 1987) and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Peter will try to solve a problem that has intrigued climate scientists for decades: glacial cycles in the Pleistocene. The work is relevant to contemporary questions of how glaciers respond to climate change.
“I proposed to build an icesheet-climate model having a realistic representation of the thermodynamic affects on ice rheology. This model will permit novel exploration of the interactions between insolation, climate, and ice-sheet processes including atmospheric and geothermal heating, basal melting, and temperature dependent viscosity and will give insight into the mechanisms controlling glacial sensitivity to shifts in insolation. Through further observational analysis and modeling an understanding of the climate feedbacks which give rise to the 100,000-year glacial variability appears to be within reach. Given recent progress and the clear avenues for future work, solving the Pleistocene glacial cycle problem is not an implausible goal.”
In January 2007, Peter accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
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Valeriy Ivanov |
Valeriy Ivanov is a hydrologist interested in how climate and topography affect water, energy, and vegetation dynamics in natural landscapes.
Valeriy received an honors diploma in hydrology from Moscow State University in 1996 and was a graduate student in that program through 1998, receiving a Russian Government Graduate Scholarship award. He was a field technician at the Khibiny Research Station in Murmansk region and with a prospecting group on the Lena River in Yakutia. In 1997, he was field hydrologist with an expedition above the Arctic Circle organized by the Russian and U.S. National Geographic Societies on the plateau Putorana in East Siberia, and he was featured in the resulting magazine piece.
Valeriy transferred to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, receiving an M.S. degree in 2002 and a Ph.D. degree earlier this year. He helped refine and, with a colleague, totally revise a distributed physically-based rainfall-runoff model, which is now licensed and distributed by MIT for education and research purposes. For his Ph.D. research, Valeriy shifted his focus to the relationship between the distribution of vegetation and topography. His thesis, “Effects of Dynamic Vegetation and Topography on Hydrological Processes in Semi-Arid Areas,” will be a foundation for his work at Harvard.
Valeriy has been a teaching assistant at the Zvenigorod Research Station near Moscow, and was a lecturer last year in MIT's “Introduction to Hydrology” course. He has published his research in Water Resources Research, the Journal of Hydrology, and, with colleagues, in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, the International Journal of Geographic Information Science, and others.
As an Environmental Fellow, he will work with Professor Steven Wofsy of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, on how vegetation organizes itself in arid and semi-arid areas. Valeriy describes his work:
“Vegetation is an important component of terrestrial systems, playing a significant role in the processes of land-surface water and energy partition. Ecosystems of arid and semi-arid areas represent a particularly intriguing object for studies, as they comprise some of the major biomes of the world, often exhibiting a delicate equilibrium between their essential constituents. Many important issues depend on the quantitative understanding of dynamics inherent to these ecosystems, including human interference, climate change, environmental preservation, and proper management of resources. This postdoctoral research proposal seeks to investigate a number of interdisciplinary questions that concern the spatial organization and composition of vegetation in these areas: What are the spatial preferential states of the vegetation system in a complex terrain? What governs the spatial composition of vegetation in water-limited ecosystems? These questions will be addressed through examining the links between the hydrological cycle and vegetation dynamics characterized through both observations and process-oriented modeling at the basin scale. Field-observed and remotely sensed data for experimental sites in New Mexico will be used in the analysis.”
In September 2007, Valeriy joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor.
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Alex Johnson |
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.
Alex received a B.S. in physics with high distinction and honors in physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, in 1999. As an undergraduate, he worked on gravitation and semiconductor optics, and spent a summer working on laser-based manufacturing techniques for Panasonic. He earned a Barry Goldwater scholarship and a prize for creative achievement in physics, and then spent a summer as a research assistant at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory working on X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.
With a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, he came to Harvard in 2000 to work on his Ph.D., which he earned in November 2005. Research for his thesis (“Charge Sensing and Spin Dynamics in GaAs Quantum Dots”) included what his advisor, Charles Marcus, called “a series of groundbreaking experiments” which resulted in a set of papers by Alex and his colleagues that were published in Nature, Science, and Physical Review.
As an Environmental Fellow, Alex will leave the Physics Department for engineering. He will work with Assistant Professor Shriram Ramanathan of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Alex hopes to develop cleaner and more efficient energy technologies that will accelerate the transition from an oil-based to a hydrogen-based energy infrastructure. He describes his work this way:
“I propose to apply the techniques of microfabrication, including optical lithography, thin film deposition, and wafer bonding, to the production of solid oxide fuel cells. These techniques have been developed extensively by the semiconductor industry, but despite their wide availability (both at Harvard and commercially) they have not been applied to fuel cells. I anticipate building prototypes with lower operating temperature and/or higher power density than existing solid oxide fuel cells. This would be the first microfabricated fuel cell, and could enable fuel cell use in a variety of portable applications. Lower temperature and smaller size will also allow the study of new materials and new interface physics which may lead to further performance enhancement.”
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David M. Thompson |
David Thompson is a string theorist with a deeper interest in global climate change. He will focus his attention on “a study of moist convection in a warming world.”
In four years at Yale, David earned a B.S. in mathematics and both a B.S. and M.S. in physics. He graduated in 1999 and joined the Physics Department at Harvard, which awarded him a Ph.D in 2005. He has spent the last year working on climate change in the Arctic and energy technology and policy issues as a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center and the Harvard Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
David has been a teaching fellow and resident tutor in physics at Harvard and was an adjunct professor of physics at Suffolk University in Massachusetts in 2004. While teaching at Harvard, he developed LaTeX2Tri, a software program that allows blind students to read papers in physics and mathematics; this work was published in the Proceedings of the 20 th Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities.
As the lead researcher in Harvard's Alternative Fuel Vehicle Project in 2001, David assembled recommendations that led to the use of environmentally-friendly biodiesel in all of Harvard's trucks and buses. His work on string theory has been published in Physical Review. His book on physical geology, Processes that Shape the Earth, is in press at Chelsea House.
As an Environmental Fellow, he will work with Assistant Professor Zhiming Kuang in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. He will build analytical and numerical models of moist convection over the tropical oceans, which will help to illuminate the relationship between warming temperatures and hurricanes. David explains:
“Moist convection is the rising of warm, moist ar that creates clouds and precipitation. Although simple in principle, moist convection still poses many unsolved riddles. As a result of poorly understood feedbacks between moist convective processes and global temperature, estimates of the magnitude of global warming remain as uncertain today as they were over 25 years ago. Another large uncertainty is the future response of hurricanes to global warming. Hurricane behavior may change dramatically over the coming decades, but a better understanding of moist convection will be required before this change can be quantified.”
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Roxanne Willis |
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.
Roxanne will receive her Ph.D. in American Studies this spring from Yale University. She received her M.A. in American studies from Yale in 2002 and her B.A. in anthropology from Harvard (summa cum laude) in 1997. At Yale, she was an instructor in classes on “The Alaskan Environment in American History and Culture” and “Wilderness in the North American Imagination.” She has been a teaching fellow in courses on “Alcohol and Other Drugs in American Culture,” and “The Formation of Modern American Culture, 1920-present.”
This fall, Western Historical Quarterly will publish Roxanne's “A New Game in the North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1840-1940. Her dissertation was titled, “Making Alaska American: Environment and Development in a Foreign Land.” She calls it “the first comprehensive examination of Alaskan development schemes and their environmental consequences.”
Before entering graduate school, Roxanne was a coordinator at The Green Group in Washington, DC, and a senior account executive at Hyde Park Communications, also in Washington.
As a fellow, Roxanne will work with Professor Lawrence Buell in the Department of English and American Literature and Language. She plans to continue the work she started in her dissertation to “recover the lost history of development in Alaska,” which reveals how “Alaskan policy has often been based more firmly in the American imagination than in any environmental reality.” She writes:
“My ambition is to create a book that is at once scholarly, rigorous, accessible to the well-educated reader and useful for the decision-makers shaping American environmental policy. The project currently examines five twentieth century environment and development conflicts in Alaska: the introduction of domesticated reindeer at the turn of the century, the creation of an agricultural colony during the New Deal period, the construction of the Alaska Highway during World War II, the debate over the proposed Rampart Dam in the 1960s, and the controversy over the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. My book manuscript will include two additional case studies. The first will examine the 1950s debate of “Project Chariot,” a proposition to create an artificial harbor through the detonation of an atomic weapon at Cape Thompson, Alaska. The second will discuss the controversy over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, focusing specifically on the late 1980s.”
Generous gifts from Robert Ziff and the Beagle Foundation will support the fellows' research. Huybers, Ivanov, Johnson, and Thompson will be known as the Ziff Environmental Fellows at Harvard. Alagona, Downey, and Willis will be the Beagle Environmental Fellows at Harvard.
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