Jay Feldman (Transportation, Technology, and Policy Graduate Group)

Lauren Shaw (Ecology Gradutate Group)

Lauren is an Ecology grad student within the Environmental Policy Analysis AOE. She is interested in the behavioral aspects of sustainable agriculture- what makes growers adopt sustainable practices and how can we use networking and policymaking to increase the frequency of sustainable practices. She is working on developing a survey for winegrape growers in Lodi, California to determine what attitudes, behaviors and demographic characteristics predict their participation in sustainability programs and their adoption of sustainable practices.

Kelly Garbach (Ecology Graduate Group)

I am interested in balancing conservation goals and agricultural production needs, and determining how on-farm management practices influence ecosystem processes. My current fieldwork in Costa Rica explores provision of ecosystem services in tropical farming systems. Other projects include research on conceptual frameworks used in ecosystem assessment and environmental mitigation in California. Before entering the Ecology program at UC Davis, I studied anthropology at Loyola University Chicago and worked with non-profit groups in Chile, Argentina, and San Francisco.

Adam Henry(Graduated 2009; Assistant Professor of Public Administration, West Virginia State University; Transportation, Technology and Policy Graduate Group)

My current research focuses on collaborative land-use and transportation planning in California, and applying various theoretical frameworks to explain the success or failure of regional planning efforts. More specifically, I am interested in better understanding belief systems and their role in political conflict, policy-oriented learning, and the use of network analysis for hypothesis testing in the Advocacy Coalition Framework.

Lucas Lippert (Master's degree 2008; Water Resources Technician for the Monterey County Water Resources Agency; Ecology Graduate Group)

Lucas is a Masters student within the Environmental Policy AOE. He is conducting a study of Integrated Regional Water Management in California, with a focus on the Bay Area IRWMP plan. In 2008 he conducted a survey of Bay Area stakeholders regarding their participation and attitudes towards IRWMP.

Vicken Hillis (Ecology Graduate Group)

I'm interested in the ways in which genetic and cultural processes interact to shape the evolution of modern human behavior. Recent human evolutionary history is full of anomalies: the rise of complex civilizations, unprecedented technological innovation, widespread warfare, and cooperation among large numbers of unrelated individuals, to name a few. I examine how a highly developed capacity for the social transmission of information (e.g. imitation and teaching) has played a role in human evolution, and produced apparently anomalous outcomes.

My dissertation research involves an empirical examination of the phenomenon of ethnicity. Humans are unique in that they form ethnic groups: populations with distinct behavioral norms that are marked by arbitrary, symbolic traits. What mechanisms account for this process? How are ethnic markers and underlying behavioral norms transmitted among individuals, and how do these mechanisms drive the origin and maintenance of ethnic groups?

Tim Waring (Ecology Graduate Group)

I'm broadly interested in the ways that human culture evolves in relationship with the biotic environment, through both changing institutions and technology. Since human culture is an evolutionary process, it should drive both diversification and optimization of socio-ecological systems. I am currently conducting research in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on effects of social and ethnic diversity on the provision of sustainable environmental management as a public good. A large literature suggests that ethnic, social and economic diversity can negatively effect the provisioning of public goods. But how does social diversity diminish public goods provision, and what factors influence this relationship? I hope to address these questions with regards to environmental management strategies (communal forest & irrigation management) in the Palni Hills of Tamil Nadu by comparing villages with varying levels of social diversity. I am also studying the ways that this same ethnic diversity influences the ways that individuals relate to each other in simplistic economic situations. To this end I employ behavioral economic games.  Lastly, I also study non-environmentally linked cultural traits. At my field site I document the methods of design and pathways of learning that make up the unique south Indian Kolam tradition.

Chris Congleton (On left in picture; Transportation, Technology, and Policy Graduate Group)

Chris Congleton is a PhD candidate in Transportation Technology and Policy at UC Davis. His work examines collective problem-solving of transportation-related problems from multiple angles, through understanding the combination of individual and community-level decision processes, transportation infrastructure, and travel and communication technologies that together entail aggregate travel behavior in communities. His recent work focuses on lower impact mode safety, the separation local lower impact travel from regional travel, human hybrid electric vehicle design for low speed lightweight mode networks, modeling collective action in travel behavior, and comparing community-based approaches to transportation planning processes.

He cofounded the Davis Bicycle Church and volunteers there helping people learn to repair their bicycles, proposed and pioneered the Annual Campus Travel Assessment at UC Davis jointly funded by UCD TAPS and the the UCD Sustainable Transportation Center, has worked as a transportation planning consultant to regional government, has produced several films about local transportation choices and collective problems, and drives, modifies, and repairs ancient transit technologies including a 1957 Chevy school bus converted to LPG and a 1967 GMC New Look transit bus. He is an NSF IGERT Fellow and a Sustainable Transportation Center Dissertation Fellow.

Jeremy Brooks (Graduated 2008; on job market; Ecology Graduate Group)

My interests lie in the human dimensions of conservation and in the underlying motivation for conservation in different societies. I am particularly interested in the debate, and frequent tension, regarding the importance of ethically or socially motivated conservation and market-based or economically motivated conservation. I am conducting my dissertation research in Bhutan hoping to determine the role of social factors in conservation in households and communities with different levels of development and market integration as well as exploring the impacts that development and market integration are having (supporting or eroding?) on conservation norms.

Patricia Pinho (Graduated 2007; Post-doc in Brazil; Ecology Graduate Group)

My research project uses a longitidunal study of social and ecological factors to investigate the great array of rules that local communities have developed in order to cope with common-pool resources in the tropics. A set of conservation strategies developed by the Caboclo community in the central Brazilian Amazon in Silves will be evaluated. Collective actions by the Caboclo have led to a complex ecological zoning system that thrives on the conservation of endangered fish species, Colossoma Macropomun and Arapaima gigas and the floodplain (varzea) ecosystem. As the conservation efforts of Silves were created in response to local concerns and interests, some of the mainstream assumptions that common property regimes and local communities are always obstacles to the protection and sustainable use of a particular resources and the conservation of biodiversity will be challenged. This project will highlights the paradigm shift by looking at local communities in tropical forest not only as a group of users interested in maximizing their gains in a short run, but as a community that is immersed in set of cultural values and attributes that leads to the well suited management of natural resources and species protection.

Vakur Sumer (Visiting Scholar from Turkey, Fall 2008-2009)

My research areas include the role of the Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60) and other water related EU legislation in regional and national water policies of Turkey, transboundary rivers, water stress and water scarcity, Integrated River Basin Management, competing and conflicting water uses, EU-Turkey environmental negotiations. My dissertation will focus on how Europeanization has been influencing Turkey's water management through changes in discourses, institutional arrangements and social networks.

Suadi (Visiting Scholar from Indonesia, Winter 2009)

Coastal communties face challenging common-pool resource dilemmas such as overfishing, coastal pollution, and human migration. My dissertation research focues on how Indonesian coastal communties cope with and adatp to such collective action problems. What types of management regimes have evolved? How do these management regimes operate in the face of changing property rights and increased economic devleopment? How are traditional religious values integrated with these management regimes? I conduct my studies on three islands of Indonesia: (1) in main island of the country, in Java, (2) in the center of the globalizing tourism industries of Bali, and (3) in the growing area of Sumbawa Island. So far, I have studied the linkage between fisheries expansion and development policy. I also study the root causes of conflict in coastal fisheries and approaches to resolve them peacefully, such as local collaborative decision-making. Such approach seems to be a promising to enrich or improve the weaknesses/failures of the main government-led approach. I also conduct studying on the key factors for the achievement of resource sharing among the coastal communities. The important roles of women in CPRs governance lead me incorporating my analysis also from gender perspective. You may find the detail about me at my personal webpage at http://suadi.staff.ugm.ac.id.