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.
The 2008 Environmental Fellows at Harvard
As a group, they will enhance environmental scholarship at Harvard and help tie together many of the University's academic departments and graduate schools.
“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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Etienne Benson |
Etienne Benson is a historian of the environmental sciences with a particular interest in the field practices of late twentieth-century conservation biology.
Etienne received an AB in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard College in 1999 and an MA in psychology from Stanford University in 2001. He spent several years working as a science writer in Washington, DC, before enrolling in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, where he received his Ph.D. in June 2008. His dissertation focused on the politics of surveillance in wildlife conservation. It showed how the practice of wildlife radio-tagging was contested by scientists, hunters, environmentalists, and other groups interested in wild animals and their habitats between the 1950s and the 1990s, and how those contests have shaped wildlife conservation today.
As an Environmental Fellow, Etienne will work with Janet Browne in the History of Science Department. In addition to continuing the work on environmental surveillance begun in his dissertation, he will begin a new project on the history of efforts to export modern conservation biology to the developing world during the Cold War era.
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Bill Boos |
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.
He received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from MIT in 2008, and previously received an M.S. in geosystems from MIT, and undergraduate degrees in physics and math from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Bill’s doctoral thesis examined the cause of the abrupt onset of monsoon circulations, in which the start of summer rains and the reversal of the prevailing winds begin much more rapidly than can be explained by a linear response to the seasonal changes in insolation. This work is part of the broader task of understanding the fundamental mechanisms of variability of monsoon circulations, which subject billions of people in the tropics to floods and droughts that are poorly predicted by modern forecasters.
After completing his doctoral studies, Bill worked as part of an effort to improve the representation of clouds and precipitation in global climate models. For his master’s thesis, he used a computer model to show that the strong mixing of ocean waters by hurricanes might play a role in the ocean circulation that transports heat to high latitudes. And throughout much of his time at MIT, he worked with a group of students to install a novel flood prediction system in a river basin in northern Honduras that is often inundated by tropical storms and hurricanes.
As an Environmental Fellow, Bill will work with Zhiming Kuang in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science to better understand the physics of a dominant type of variability in monsoon climates that produces excess or deficient rainfall on time scales of several weeks. Bill is also broadly interested in how such variations in tropical climate can threaten food security in developing nations, and in how statistical predictions might be leveraged to provide socio-economic support during these threats.
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Susan Cameron |
Susan Cameron is an ecologist and conservation biologist who studies how climate change shapes patterns of biodiversity.
Susan recently completed a Ph.D. in Ecology with an emphasis in Conservation Ecology at the University of California Davis, where she was a member of the department of Environmental Science and Policy. Previously she earned a B.S. in Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Susan’s thesis explored the role of Quaternary climate change in shaping biodiversity patterns in tropical rainforests, primarily in Australia. She developed, with assistance from collaborators, a spatially-explicit model to predict genetic diversity between populations. In the model, historical climate change explained over 40% of the genetic diversity between populations of an endemic lizard. She is also interested in prioritizing areas for biodiversity conservation, and has collaborated with Australian and Papua New Guinean scientists on identifying conservation areas in south eastern Papua New Guinea.
As an environmental fellow, Susan will continue to study how past climate change has affect contemporary diversity patterns. She will work with Scott Edwards, professor of Zoology and curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, to understand how North American songbirds responded to the last ice age. She will develop models to predict how species may have adapted or migrated in response to climate change and test these models with genetic data.
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Mauricio Santillana |
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. He has a deep interest in creating bridges between mathematics and its applications, particularly within the engineering community.
In 2001, Mauricio received a B.S. in physics with honors from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. After which, he started graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a M.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 2003. Since 2003, he has been part of the inter-disciplinary research team at the Research Institute for Geography and Geomatics, CentroGeo, based in Mexico City and part of the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico. In 2004, Mauricio started his Ph.D. studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral work in computational fluid dynamics has been inspired by the need to simulate flooding in coastal areas during severe weather events, such as hurricanes, and consists of analyzing, developing and implementing a mathematical model to simulate overland flow in vegetated areas such as coastal wetlands.
As an Environmental Fellow, Mauricio will work closely with Eli Tziperman (EPS, SEAS) in a project whose motivation is to understand the mechanisms by which ice streams are generated in ice sheets. Mauricio will also work with Daniel Jacob (SEAS) and Michael Brenner (SEAS) on a project aimed at understanding both the underlying mechanisms that allow pollution plumes to persist in the troposphere on a global scale and why current Chemical Transport Models fail to maintain the coherence of plumes during global-scale transport.
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Alex Wissner-Gross |
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.
Alex received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007 from Harvard University for his work on programmable surfaces, which dramatically increased the computational versatility of a range of materials. He has authored 14 publications and received seven full or pending patents. In 2003, Alex became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics, while simultaneously graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering as the Henry Ford II Scholar. His research has been featured in BusinessWeek, Wired, USA Today, Scientific American, and The New York Times. He is also the recipient of 80 national and international distinctions, including the Dan David Prize Scholarship for Future Energy Research from Tel Aviv University (2007), Hertz Fellowship (2003), DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (2003), British Marshall Scholarship (2003), Intel Undergraduate Research Award (2002), Goldwater Scholarship (2001), Intel Science Talent Search Winner (1999), USA Team Member at International Olympiad in Informatics (1998), First Place in the USA Computer Olympiad (1998), American Computer Science League Winner (1998,1999), and the AT&T Student Software Award (1997).
As an Environmental Fellow, Alex will work with Matt Welsh of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to develop a framework for instrumenting computers and other network-capable devices with enough intelligence to monitor and manage their own environmental footprints. He plans to use his own custom-built sensor network to develop a device-level dynamical model of the environmental footprint of the entire Internet. For more information, visit www.alexwg.org.
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Shengwei Zhu |
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.
Shengwei received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 1996. Then he transferred to the graduate school of engineering at the University of Tokyo in Japan, receiving an M.S. in 2001 and a Ph.D in 2005, both in architecture. He spent the following year working at the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS), the University of Tokyo, as a postdoctoral fellow. Since December 2006, he has been working as a Hans Christian Ørsted postdoctoral fellow at the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy (ICIEE), Technical University of Denmark. He has a strong expertise in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of distributions of physical properties such as velocity, air temperature and contaminant in indoor environment, which are resulting from the complex interactions between the occupants and their surroundings by means of the exchanges of air, heat, humidity, multifold contaminants, etc. Since Shengwei transferred to ICIEE, he has been working on the development of advanced methods for air distribution in occupied spaces with focus on protection of people from airborne transmission of infectious diseases.
As an Environmental Fellow, Shengwei will work with John Spengler, (Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health). He plans to develop effective mechanical ventilation methods to restrain in-bus airborne infection transmission due to passengers’ exhalation, coughing and walking, based on CFD simulation of the airborne transport of exhaled viruses. Additionally, he will use the mathematic epidemiology models to predict the probability of the infection. It will conduce to improve the performance of the ventilation systems in buses and other vehicles such as trains, trams, metros, etc, to limit the in-vehicle airborne infection transmission caused by exhaled viruses. It is very important as people spend 5-7% of their lifetime in transit.
The Center expects to name six more fellows to join them in the fall of 2009 and six more each year thereafter, so that there will always be approximately a dozen Environmental Fellows in residence throughout the University. Details of the next application process will be posted on the Center's website later this fall.
Details on the 2007 fellows and their research projects
Details on the 2006 fellows and their research projects
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