Research & Teaching

Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystem is one of the greatest challenges humankind is facing. For this reason, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.

Biogeography aims to explain distributions of organisms through historical and ecological factors. This course will focus on the history of biogeographic research, developments in the area of historical biogeography, and on ecological processes that affect distributions of whole clades.

This course covers theoretical basis for low-frequency seismology.  The topics covered include boundary conditions, eigenfunctions and frequencies of the Earth, normal-mode summations for synthetic seismogram calculations, surface waves, and model-ray duality.

To wander about among a vegetation which is new to one is pleasant and instructive. It is the same with familiar plants as with other familiar objects: in the end we cease to think about them at all. But what is seeing without thinking? (Goethe, Italian Journey)

An advanced language and culture class that examines literature and films portraying the political, sociological, financial and environmental impact of multinational companies doing business in Latin America.

Concepts and applications of chemical kinetics and thermodynamics for environmental science and engineering.

Notes: ESE 164 is also offered as E-PSCI 164. Students may not take both for credit.

Recommended Prep: Physical Sciences 11 or equivalent in general chemistry.

The purpose of this course is to develop understanding and guide student research of human and environmental systems. In class we will explore agriculture, conflict, and transmissible disease.

This course will explore the relationship between climate, environment and human evolution. How did hominins and other mammals adapt to global cooling and grassland expansion?

What do landslides in Brazil, droughts in California, mass migration in Syria and the collapse of Mayan civilization all have in common? Water. This course introduces students to the terrestrial water cycle: how it works, how humans manipulate it, and how it manipulates us.

What one thing is changing everything in your lifetime—and for generations to come? It’s changing what you eat; it’s changing buildings you live in; and it’s changing politics, the arts, and finance. The change is accelerating.

This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth. This course will be taught by faculty from the Microbial Sciences Initiative.

Within our solar system, Earth is distinguished as the planet with life. Life was born of planetary processes, has been sustained for some four billion years by planetary processes, and through time has emerged as a set of planetary processes that is important in its own right.

Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.

As human population grows, our collective influence is becoming an almost ubiquitous feature in the natural world, and the marine environment is no exception.

The oceans contain 97 percent of the Earth's water, and host the most disparate ecosystems on the planet. This course provides an introduction to deep sea ocean habitats, animals, and microorganisms.

This course lays out the significance of the international tourism industry, which represents approximately 10.4 percent of the global economy.

This course is a survey course on Natural Resources Law. Topics covered include Wildlife and Biodiversity, Living Marine Resources, Rangelands, Forest Lands, Protected Lands, Minerals, Forests, and Energy Resources.