Institute 2000 Guest Lecturers
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David Bray
Florida International University - Dept. of Environmental Studies Dr. David Bray is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at Florida International University. Dr. Bray conducts research on community natural resource management in Latin America, particularly southern Mexico. He is carrying out applied research on grassroots organizational dynamics, policy processes, and forest and agroforestry management with a community organization in central Quintana Roo, Mexico. The organization has been sustainably managing nearly 500,000 hectares of dry tropical forest and related ecosystems for over 15 years, but are facing major challenges in managing their mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) resources as well as many lesser-known tropical species. He also conducts research on sustainable agriculture, particularly the social dimensions of organic coffee production and is writing up a four-year study of the social and economic impact of organic coffee production in Chiapas, Mexico, and will be exploring new research opportunities in this area in Oaxaca, Mexico. Having spent 11 years working in international development in Latin America, he is in contact with a wide range of research and action opportunities on grassroots sustainable resource management in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. E-mail address: brayd@fiu.edu |
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Paul Filmer
US National Science Foundation – Directorate for Geosciences Paul Filmer is a Program Director reporting to the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for Geosciences (NSF/GEO). His experience at NSF includes managerial, budget and science policy/planning responsibilities for international global change research. Dr. Filmer received a B.Sc. degree with honors in Geophysics from Caltech in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Marine Geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1992. Dr. Filmer’s current responsibilities within the Geosciences Directorate include the management of US Government relations with the following organizations: the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), an international treaty organization supporting research and education activities throughout the Americas; the European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH), an organization under the European Council to support research in Europe, Africa, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); and the Asia-Pacific Network (APN), which funds research in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Island States. Dr. Filmer is also the Program Director for the GLOBE Program, a White House initiative to form partnerships between leading scientists and educators resulting in a scientifically rigorous data collection program carried out by school children in over 90 countries. Dr. Filmer is interested in the development of a worldwide network of scientific research institutions which can contribute useful results and information to the political and economic sectors of our society, based on the concepts of scientific excellence, peer-review, and accountability. E-mail address: pfilmer@nsf.gov
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Marc A. Levy
Center for International Earth Science Information Network - Columbia University Marc A. Levy is Lead Project Scientist, Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) in the Columbia University Earth Institute. He is also CIESIN's Acting Director for Science Applications. CIESIN's mission is to develop information products and services that integrate social and natural science data in ways useful for decision making, policy analysis, and social science scholarship. Levy has taught political science and international environmental policy at Williams College and Princeton University. He has published on the effectiveness of international environmental institutions, on policies to reduce European acid rain, and on environment-security connections. Levy is coeditor (with Robert O. Keohane and Peter M. Haas) of Institutions for the Earth (MIT Press, 1993) and coeditor (with Keohane) of Institutions for Environmental Aid (MIT Press, 1996). E-mail address: marc.levy@ciesin.org
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Diana Liverman
University of Arizona Diana Liverman is Director of the Latin American Area Center and Latin American Studies Program at the University of Arizona. Dr. Liverman's research examines the social causes and consequences of environmental change, especially in Latin America. For most of her career she has been closely associated with what is now called human dimensions of global environmental change research and now advises several US and international agencies on activities in this area. Currently she is working on the impacts of climate variability and global warming on agriculture and water resources, and on the anthropogenic causes of changes in land use and land cover, both with a regional focus on Mexico. She is particularly interested in how changes in social variables such as land tenure, water law, population, consumption, agricultural subsidies, trade, and values alter land management decisions and vulnerability to drought. Dr. Liverman was the social sciences leader of the first IAI/UM Summer Institute in 1999. She is a member of IAI's Science Advisory Committee. E-mail address: liverman@u.arizona.edu |
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Ronnie Lovler
The Weather Channel Latin America Ronnie Lovler is programming manager for The Weather Channel Latin America (TWCLA)/El Canal del Tiempo, a Spanish language cable network and the most reliable source of meteorological information for Latin America. She is a seasoned professional, with more than 25 years experience in print and broadcast journalism in Latin America. Prior to joining the Weather Channel, she was with CNN as a bureau chief and correspondent in Latin America for nine years before returning to the U.S. to work at CNN headquarters. While in the field, she covered the civil wars and peace processes in Central America, the invasion of Panama, the process of democratization in Chile and the conflict between Peru and Ecuador among other events. She also covered numerous elections and presidential summits in the region. Lovler’s first journalism job was in Puerto Rico at the San Juan Star, where she wrote her first stories on a typewriter. E-mail address: rlovler@weather.com
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Michael McClain
Florida International University - Dept. of Environmental Studies Dr. McClain is an Assistant Professor at Florida International University's Department of Environmental Studies. Dr. McClain's interests lie in integrated watershed analysis and management. His research is focused in the headwater basins of the Amazon, where dynamic processes of human development threaten to irreversibly damage some of Earth's most unique land and aquatic ecosystems. Dr. McClain and his students apply combined field, laboratory, remote sensing, and computer modeling techniques to illuminate natural hydrological and biogeochemical processes. Knowledge of these processes is then factored into resource management programs in order to build more sustainable human communities. E-mail address: mcclain@fiu.edu |
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Carlos Nobre
Centro de Previsão do Tempo e Estudos Climáticos - CPTEC Dr. Carlos Nobre received a Ph.D. in Meteorology (1983) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is currently the Director of CPTEC, Brazil's center for weather forecasting and climate studies. His research interests include tropical meteorology, climate dynamics, and vegetation-atmosphere interactions. Dr. Nobre is coordinator of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), which is an international research initiative led by Brazil. LBA is designed to create the new knowledge needed to understand the climatological, ecological, biogeochemical, and hydrological functioning of Amazonia, the impact of land use change on these functions, and the interactions between Amazonia and the Earth system. E-mail address: nobre@cptec.inpe.br |
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Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa
University of Alberta - Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Dr. Sánchez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Dr. Sanchez's research is related with the study of impacts of land use/cover change (LUCC) on biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation in tropical environments. He uses remote sensing and geographic information systems as tools to try to understand past and present LUCC trends, and how they affect the sustainability of natural resources. E-mail address: arturo.sanchez@ualberta.ca |
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Roberto Sánchez Rodriguez
University of California Santa Cruz, Department of Environmental Sciences Dr. Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez is an Associate professor of Environmental Studies. He received a degree in Architecture from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Dortmund. Dr. Sanchez' research focuses on environmental problems in urban areas, primarily with respect to development and environmental issues in Mexico and Latin America. He has worked on transboundary environmental problems on the U.S.-Mexico border and on human dimensions of global environmental change (with particular emphasis on water resources). He is currently examining the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement for continental environmental issues. E-mail address: rsanchez@cats.ucsc.edu |
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Billie Turner II
Clark University - Dept. of Geography Dr. Turner is Professor (Higgins Chair of Environment and Society) at the Department of Geography in Clark University. His current research interests include land-cover and land-use change in the southern Yucatán peninsular region—spatially explicit probability approaches for modeling and projecting deforestation and land cover linked to remotely sensed imagery: a project with B. Savitsky, J. Geoghegan and others, and in cooperation with Harvard Forest and ECOSUR-Unidad Chetumal (Mexico); the project seeks to explain the dynamics of land-use/cover change in the region over the past 25 years and explores ways to wed remote sensing- and social science-based models of this change; funded by the NASA-LCLUC initiative from 1997 to 2000. E-mail address: BTurner@clarku.edu |
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| Contact: | Guillermo Podestá (gpodesta@rsmas.miami.edu), Summer Institute Science Coordinator Telephone:+1.305.361.4142 |
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