Faculty Research and Practice Areas

Karen Bailey: Climate adaptation/resilience, sustainable rural livelihoods, human health and well-being, human-wildlife conflict, and justice and equity in STEM

Maxwell Boykoff: Environmental governance, environmental communication, political economy and the environment.

Cassandra Brooks: Environmental governance and policy across scales from local to international, marine science, and natural resource conservation.

Amanda Carrico: Human-environment interactions; environmental psychology; decision-making and behavior; climate change and migration.

Dave Ciplet: Climate and energy justice, just transitions, global climate governance.

Warren Cook: The rhetoric of environmental politics, especially water justice in the U.S. American West.

Dan Doak: Conservation biology, ecology.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater: Environmental and Sustainability Education, Collaborative Planning and Network Governance, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Transitions, & Community-based Research and Engagement Methods.

Mark Gasta (does not accept research students): Outdoor recreation economy, leadership development, corporate social and environmental responsibility, systemic change

Benjamin Hale: Environmental ethics and policy, applied ethics, normative ethics, metaethics, and ethical and environmental concerns of emerging technologies.

Joel Hartter: Sustainability, Outdoor recreation economy, human-environment interactions, conservation, and natural resource management

Joanna Lambert: Community ecology, nutritional ecology, mammals in anthropogenic landscapes, human-wildlife coexistence and conflict, special focus on primates and carnivores.

Jill Litt: Neighborhood environments and health, nature-based social prescribing, environmental and policy change to support pro-health behaviors, and community-based participatory research.

Gregor MacGregor: (does not accept research students):Environmental law and policy. 

Meghan McCarroll: (does not accept research students): Community water literacy as a tool for sustainable water management.

Zia Mehrabi: Food security, climate change, biodiversity, human health, welfare, infrastructure, technology.

Steve Miller: Environmental and natural resource economics, quantitative environmental policy analysis, effects of climate change on natural resource use and economies, applied statistics and machine learning.

Riley Mulhern: Private well water quality in the U.S., Lead risks in schools, childcare centers, and low-income housing, Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), Community and environmental health impacts of mining, & Point-of-use water treatment for reducing drinking water exposures.

Peter Newton: Socio-environmental systems, food systems, tropical forests, rural livelihoods, sustainable development.

Natalie Ooi (does not accept research students): Outdoor Recreation Economy, Sustainable Tourism Destination Management, Community Economic Development, Mountain Resort Communities

Nirav Patel: Sustainable development, with emphasis on the linkages between environmental and socio-economic systems.

Josh Radoff (does not accept research students): Decarbonization, energy systems electrification, renewable energy development, green building, climate action planning, corporate sustainability, local government policy development.

Alice Reznickova: (does not accept research students):Community food security and food justice.

William Shutkin (does not accept research students): Urban resilience and sustainability, climate justice, sustainable cities, sustainability planning and management

Damien Thompson: (does not accept research students): Food justice, food sovereignty, permaculture design, small-scale urban food production, community food systems, racial equity in the food system and urban geography.

Carrie Vodehnal: Normative Ethical Theory, Applied Ethics, Moral Psychology


Associated Faculty

Lisa Barlow: Climate change and resilience Education (works primarily with first-year undergraduates).

Fernando Briones: The social dimensions of environmental change, resilience, social vulnerability, disasters risk reduction and climate change adaptation in the global south and US marginalized groups.

Clint Carroll: Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and anthropology.

Deserai Crow: Local and state-level environmental policy, natural disaster recovery and risk mitigation in local communities and natural resource agencies.

Meaghan Daly: The science-policy interface and collaborative knowledge production for climate adaptation and mitigation, Adaptive capacities and the dynamics of vulnerability to climate change within socio-ecological systems, and Media coverage and science communication about climate change.

Lisa Dilling: Accelerating the energy transition, Climate adaptation strategies, Policy analysis and tradeoffs, and How decision maker values and perception affect policy choices.

Liam Downey: Environmental sociology, environmental inequality, race and ethnic relations, urban sociology, stratification/inequality, political sociology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Nicholas Flores: Environmental and resource economics.

Mickey Glantz: How climate affects society and how society affects climate, and especially how climate anomalies and human activities interact to affect quality of life issues.

Bruce Goldstein: Long-term, Large-scale Social-ecological Planning, and Collaborative Negotiation and Governance.

Michael Gooseff:  Stream-groundwater interactions, contaminant transport and fate, polar earth system responses to climate change, ecosystem processes in polar landscapes, aquatic biogeochemical cycling, and water quality modeling.

Jill Lindsey Harrison: Environmental sociology, environmental justice, Sociology of agriculture and food, immigration politics, and political theories of justice.

Jonathan Hughes: Environmental economics, empirical industrial organization, and transportation and energy economics.

Tyler Jones: Abrupt climate change (or the potential for it) through the lens of science, society, and culture. Our current focus areas are Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica. 

Rita Klees: Biodiversity conservation, water supply and sanitation, water resource management, and environmental policy.

Paul Komor: Renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, policies, and markets.

Patricia Limerick: Environmental history, history of science in the American West, cultural perceptions of nature.

Lucy McAllister: Media and climate change communication; science communication; climate misinformation, corporate social responsibility.

J. Terrence McCabe: Livelihood strategies and decisions relating to land use among the pastoral peoples of Eastern Africa, mostly with the Turkana of northern Kenya and the Maasai of northern Tanzania.

Brian Muller: Planning methods, regional planning, and planning for hazards and climate change.

Astrid Olgilvie: Environmental and climatic history, human ecology in North Atlantic and Arctic regions, syntheses of proxy climate records, historical records of sea-ice incidence, imagology of the north.

Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke:  Using theatre as a tool for women to empower their voices for participation in the development that impacts their own lives and communities.

Phaedra C. Pezzullo: Environmental communication, environmental justice, climate justice, public advocacy, toxic politics, qualitative research.

Shawhin Roudbari: Theories/practices of contentious politics and employs ethnographic and speculative design methods. 

Rebecca Safran: Evolution of biodiversity, mechanisms of trait evolution, and population genomics.

Paul Sutter: U.S. and global environmental history, disease and the environment, and history of the environmental sciences.

Levente Szentkirályi: Business ethics, global political economy, and environmental sustainability, normative political theory, environmental policy, and international relations.

Evan Thomas: Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering.

Leaf Van Boven: Cocial psychology, environmental psychology, and political psychology.

James White: Paleoclimate and paleoceanography, global change, and geochemistry.

Olga Wilhelmi: Climate, society & environment interactions; GIS in atmospheric sciences; methods for assessing societal risk, vulnerability & adaptive capacity to natural hazards & climate change.