Personnel News

Bruce Goldstein Group

Tom James

Tom is an environmental social scientist interested in resilience, transformation, learning, and participatory action research. Tom’s research focuses on how social-ecological change is understood and manifests at multiple scales, and how processes of research can act as a capacity building tool for positive social change. Tom has particular specialisms in agroecological transitions and sustainable agriculture, and is now translating his experiences to fire adaptation and transformative learning networks.

Sarah Schweizer

Sarah is a Ph.D. candidate researching networks and adaptive organizations using frames of organizational change, resilience, and social learning. Sarah works as Director of Programs for the International START Secretariat where she develops scientific leadership and transdisciplinary programs in Africa and Asia-Pacific.

Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey

Jeremiah is a Ph.D. student in the programs of Environmental Design (ENVD) and Environmental Studies (ENVS). His work tends to focus on finding harmony in coupled natural-human systems and at the intersection of science and policy. His current research focuses on understanding the evolution of learning networks as they build resilience (social and ecological) and transform natural resource management policy, practices and culture.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater

Lee is an incoming Ph.D. student with the Environmental Studies and Design programs. His recent work includes teaching at Pace University in NYC, co-leading community programs in Costa Rica, Brazil, and Israel, and conducting an analysis of the 100 Resilient Cities Network with the Goldstein lab group. Lee’s research focuses on the genesis of shared narratives for action in multicultural collaborations and learning networks, the role of action research in social-ecological systems change, and developing new models for transformative learning in youth environmental education.

Other New Researchers and Visitors

Jack Stilgoe

Jack Stilgoe is a senior lecturer in the department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He teaches courses on science and technology policy, responsible science and innovation and the governance of emerging technologies. His most recent book is Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering (Routledge-Earthscan). The paperback was published in June 2016.

Before joining UCL he was Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, working on a framework for responsible innovation for the UK Research Councils. He was Senior Policy Adviser at the Royal Society, where he ran work on the science base, innovation, emerging technologies and public engagement. Before this, he spent four years at the independent think tank Demos, leading work on science and society. He is on the editorial board of Public Understanding of Science, a member of the Government’s Sciencewise steering group and a member of the European Commission’s expert group on Science with and for Society. He is co-editor the Guardian’s Political Science blog. He will be spending his sabbatical at CSTPR. He is on Twitter @jackstilgoe.

Augusto González

Augusto González joins CSTPR this fall under the EU Fellowship program. He holds the degree of Licenciado in Geography and History from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) as well as a Master’s degree in International Studies from University of Salford (United Kingdom). He joined the European Commission in 1989 and has worked in several policy areas including education and vocational training, space and research. His experience encompasses EU policy and law-making, international relations as well as human resources, financial and programme management. He is currently Adviser to the Director-General for Space Matters at the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Augusto lives in Brussels but maintains very close ties with his home town in Spain, where he holds elected public office (municipal counsellor).

Jessica Rich

Jessica Rich, Ph.D., joins CSTPR this fall as a CIRES Post-Doctoral Research Associate. Jessica’s research investigates how work and labor are evolving in light of global environmental change. She examines the relationships between labor and the natural environment in conflicts over oil and gas drilling in the United States. In particular, she studies the implications of conflict discourses for professional identities, how extraction workers negotiate meanings of nature, and how nature itself shapes human action. Along with her academic work, Jessica’s professional experience includes a decade of non-profit organizing in the areas of workforce development and community advocacy. Her publications can be found in Environmental Communication and Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization. Jessica earned her doctorate in 2016 from the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Justin Farrell

Justin Farrell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology. He studies environment, culture, and social movements using a mixture of methods from large-scale computational text analysis, qualitative fieldwork, network science, and machine learning. He will be spending a year at CSTPR under the CIRES Visiting Fellows Sabbatical Program.

Julia Schubert

Julia Schubert is a Research Associate at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW) in Bonn, where she is working on her dissertation project on “Scientific Expertise in Politics. The Case of Climate Engineering in the U.S.” within the Junior Research Group “Discovering, Exploring, and Addressing Grand Societal Challenges” funded by the Mercator Foundation. Her main areas of research are sociological theory (with an emphasis on differentiation- and communication-theoretical approaches), political sociology and the sociology of science with a focus on the science-politics relation.

Julia obtained her B.A. in Social Sciences from the Philipps- University of Marburg (2010) and a M.A. in Sociology from the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg (2014) with a thesis on the “Conditions and Prospects of Science-Based Political Decision-Making”. In 2011 she completed a Traineeship at the Consulting Department of the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest (GACCoM) in Chicago. She was awarded the “Alumni Preis 2014” for outstanding achievements in the Masters-Studies of Sociology by the Max-Weber-Institute for Sociology of the University of Heidelberg.

Julia has been awarded a scholarship by the Fulbright Doctoral Program and has chosen to spend her research stay at CSTPR where she will focus on the question of how scientific expertise is becoming relevant and structurally integrated into the political decision-making process. In this context, she will study the institutional interface of scientific expertise and politics in the case of political decision-making on Climate Engineering technologies in the US.

Suzanne Tegen

Suzanne Tegen manages the Wind and Water Deployment section at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory where she has been for 12 years. She has authored technical reports on economic impacts from distributed wind, utility-scale wind, offshore wind, community wind, and water power projects. She also studies the domestic wind and water power workforces including which types of jobs are needed in the long term. Suzanne spent one year as an NREL liaison to the Department of Energy’s Wind Program in Washington, D.C. She has provided invited testimony for the state of Colorado and Colorado Energy Office, has participated in National Academy of Sciences research, and was a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies (Energy Policy) from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Bachelor of the Arts in German Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include local, domestic and global energy and environmental policy, climate change, environmental justice, and wind and water power systems.

Daniel Zietlow

Dan Zietlow, our writing intern for the past 2 years, has graduated and is starting his career. Many thanks to Dan for his contributions!