Participant Biographies

Marilyn Averill, marilyn.averill@colorado.edu
Environmental Studies Department, University of Colorado
Marilyn Averill is a doctoral student in Political Science at the University of Colorado and holds Master’s degrees in Public Administration (Kennedy School of Government) and Educational Research (University of Colorado). Her current interests focus on international environmental governance, the politics of science, and science and technology policy. She has served as a teaching fellow for courses in “Environmental Politics,” “Mitigation of Climate Change,” and “Thinking about Thinking” at Harvard University, but still is rarely able to type the word “environmental” correctly. She worked for eight years as an attorney with the Office of the Solicitor at the U.S. Department of the Interior providing legal advice on natural resources and environmental issues to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service.

Robert Chen, bchen@ciesin.columbia.edu
Center for International Earth Science Information Network
Columbia University
Dr. Chen is CIESIN’s Deputy Director and a Senior Research Scientist. He manages the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), a data center in NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System. He is currently Secretary-General of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) of the International Council for Science (ICSU). He is an ex officio member on both the U.S. National Committee for CODATA of the U.S. National Research Council and the Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Analysis (TGICA) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dr. Chen serves as CIESIN’s Technical Representative to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and participates in the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Historical Data Committee. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute (MERI) of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission. In the past, he has served as chair of the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) Alliance and as a member of the Executive Committee of the NASA Earth Science Information Partner (ESIP) Federation.
At Columbia University, Dr. Chen is a member of the Working Group on Science & Technology Recruiting to Increase Diversity (STRIDE), part of the Earth Institute (EI) ADVANCE Program. He serves on steering committees for the EI Climate and Society Cross-Cutting Initiative and the Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR). In addition to his role as SEDAC Manager, Dr. Chen has managed several cooperative agreements with the FGDC on spatial data management and a project on managing geospatial electronic records with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). He recently completed a major collaborative project on the assessment of global natural disaster risks with the CHRR, the Hazard Management Unit of the World Bank, and other partners. Dr. Chen has also coordinated CIESIN’s spatial analysis and mapping support to the Millennium Development Project led by EI Director Jeffrey Sachs and oversees other projects on poverty mapping, sustainability indicators, and public health applications of Earth science data.
Prior to joining CIESIN, Dr. Chen served on the faculty of the World Hunger Program at Brown University. He has held research fellowships at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and the National Research Council in Washington DC. He has served on the Steering Committee of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change and on the Committee on Standards for Geographic Data of the Association of American Geographers. He received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds Masters and Bachelors degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rachel Craig, rcraig@nsf.gov
Biogeosciences and Carbon Cycle, National Science Foundation
Rachael Craig is program director at the National Science Foundation for Carbon Cycle and Biogeosciences. She manages the Integrated Carbon Cycle Research Program and the Biogeosciences program. Both of these are programs that span the Directorate for Geosciences. She also is team leader for the Biocomplexity program Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles which is an NSF-wide program involving multiple directorates. In her role as ICCR director Rachael serves as the NSF representative to the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group which acts to coordinate the research of multiple federal agencies in carbon cycle research. She also serves as team member for the NSF programs in Environmental Molecular Science Institutes, Ecology of Infectious Diseases, BE Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems and, in Water Cycle.

Lisa Dilling, ldilling@cires.colorado.edu
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado
Lisa Dilling studies how to develop science policies to support the use of climate-related research in decision-making. Lisa Dilling, a CIRES Visiting Fellow with the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, received her Ph.D. in biology from the University of California-Santa Barbara. She spent 6 years in Washington, DC where she managed and expanded a program in integrated carbon cycle research for the Climate and Global Change Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and co-developed a national interagency program to study the integrated carbon cycle that links together relevant research in 6 Federal agencies for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (now the U.S. Climate Change Science Program). She then spent two years as an interdisciplinary scientist with the Environmental and Societal Impacts group of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on the connection of carbon cycle science to policy, communication for climate change, and scales of decision making. Her current research at the Center focuses on the use of information in decision making and science policies related to climate and, in particular, the carbon cycle.

Maria Carmen-Lemos, lemos@umich.edu
School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan
Maria Carmen Lemos is Assistant Professor of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. She is also a Senior Policy Analyst with the Udall Center for Studies of Public Policy at the University of Arizona where she develops research initiatives in the U.S-Mexico border. Her research focuses on the human dimensions of global climate change, especially the co-production of science and policy, the role of technocrats as decisionmakers, the use of seasonal climate forecasting in drought planning and water management, the role of stakeholder-driven science in producing usable knowledge, and the broader social and political impacts of the use of technoscientific knowledge in policy making. She was part of an OGP/NOAA funded interdisciplinary project on the socioeconomic and political implications of the use of seasonal climate forecasting on drought-relief and agricultural policymaking in Northeast Brazil. She is currently the PI of two other grant proposals­funded by NSF and NOAA­to understand institutional opportunities and constraints for the use of techno-scientific information, especially seasonal climate forecasting, in water management in Brazil and Chile. Prof. Lemos holds a PhD and a MSc. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology­MIT.

Bruce Goldstein, brugo@vt.edu
School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech
Bruce Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Affairs and Planning Program in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. Initially trained as a conservation biologist, Bruce received his Ph.D. from the Department of City and Regional Planning at U.C. Berkeley in 2004. His dissertation examined the difficulties in coordinating scientific involvement in the construction of multispecies habitat conservation plans on the periphery of fast-growing cities of central and southern California. He is currently working on a U.S. Forest Service – funded study of innovation in planning for wildfire at the wildlands-urban interface in an era of devolution of state power over public lands. As these two projects suggest, Bruce is particularly interested in understanding alternatives to deadlock when environmental planning disputes are woven into a tangled mass of ecology, land use, scientific practice, and institutional form.

Tracy Johns, TJohns@unfccc.int
Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, Arizona State University
Tracy is a Master's student in the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Her research interests are in the area of international climate change policy, especially in drivers at the interface of climate change science and science policy.
Her thesis work focuses on how uncertainty in carbon cycle science may affect the reporting of emissions and sequestration of carbon in the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector of Parties' annual reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as how this will affect the role of the LULUCF sector in meeting emission targets for the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Tracy is currently doing a six month internship with the UNFCCC in Bonn, Germany.

Anthony King, kingaw@ornl.gov
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Dr. Anthony W. King is an ecosystem ecologists and modeler in the Environmental Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN. Dr. King has been with the Division since receiving his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Tennessee in 1986. With a focus on large-scale ecological processes and understanding terrestrial ecosystems as part of the global Earth system, Dr. King’s research experience includes ecosystem modeling, global carbon cycle modeling, land-use change, issues of scale and system organization, including the translation of models across spatial scale and levels of system organization, and error and uncertainty analysis of ecological models. Dr. King has a growing interest in integrating natural and social sciences into models of coupled nature-society interaction for use in sustainability science and decision support. Dr King is currently co-leader with Dr. Lisa Dilling of the first State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR), one of the synthesis and assessment products (SAR 2.2) called for by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Strategic Plan. The SOCCR is designed to synthesize and integrate current knowledge of the North American carbon budget and its role within the global carbon cycle, and to provide this information in a form useful for decision support and policy formulation concerning the carbon cycle.

Frank Laird, flaird@du.edu
Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Frank is currently associate professor of technology and public policy at the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver. His teaching and research interests there focus on environmental policy, energy policy, science and technology policy, and public policy more generally.
His educational background is interdisciplinary. Frank received a Bachelor’s degree in physics from Middlebury College, did one year of graduate work in solid state physics at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and received a Ph.D. in political science, specializing in science, technology, and public policy, from MIT. After graduate school, Frank did post-doctoral work in environmental policy in the Interdisciplinary Programs in Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Most of Frank’s research has focused on energy policy, particularly the way that renewable energy policies can affect environmental policy. His book Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values (Cambridge University Press 2001) looked at the ways in which institutionally embedded ideas shaped energy policy over a 35 year period. Frank has also published in the areas of climate change policy, environmental policy, democratic theory and S&T policy, and institutions and S&T policy. Frank is currently writing on, among other things, problems of institutional learning in complex S&T issues. Frank is particularly interested in the ways that different institutions cope with S&T issues and how one can improve institutions to make S&T better serve societal needs. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
As part of his service to the larger community, Frank has served on numerous NSF review panels, as well as being a peer reviewer for numerous journals and university presses. Frank has also done volunteer work for the American Solar Energy Society, chairing and serving on its public policy committee, as well as serving on its board of directors.

Beverly Law, bev.law@oregonstate.edu
College of Forestry, Oregon State University
Beverly Law is an associate professor of Global Change Forest Science at Oregon State University. She is the Science Chair of the AmeriFlux network of >100 research sites in the Americas. She also serves on the Science Steering Group of the North American Carbon Program. She is the principal investigator of the DOE-funded Metolius flux sites in different successional stages of ponderosa pine in Oregon, studying the processes controlling carbon dioxide and water vapor exchange between terrestrial vegetation and the atmosphere, and the principal investigator of a regional study on climate and disturbance effects on the carbon balance of Oregon and Northern California (ORCA).

Nathaniel Logar, logar@colorado.edu
University of Colorado
Nat graduated from Brown University in 2000, with a BS in Geology-Biology. Following his undergraduate degree, he worked as a tour guide in Glacier National Park, an assistant on debris flow research for the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, CO, and an environmental consultant in Boston. His undergraduate work, and his first year of graduate school, focused on climate science, but he chose an interdisciplinary graduate program out of a concern that his scientific research have policy relevance. While he began to learn about policy research in graduate school, his interests shifted from climate change science to science policy. In the past, he has performed research on the FDA approval process for transgenic fish, and as a part of an NSF-funded interdisciplinary group called Carbon, Climate, and Society. His current work focuses on the decision support goals of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Program, including its prioritization of global change science and the transfer of scientific information to meet decision maker needs.

Genevieve Maricle, genevieve.maricle@colorado.edu
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado
Genevieve Maricle is a graduate student in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder studying Atmospheric Science and Environmental Policy. Genevieve is also a fellow in the NSF Integrated Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program. Her research focuses on climate services and the transfer of technology from climate research to useful weather and climate products for both decision-makers and climate-sensitive end users. She graduated from Northwestern University with a BA degree in both Mathematics and Environmental Science. Her undergraduate studies were primarily in the sciences but she maintained a keen awareness and interest in the political implications of her work. She became extremely interested in studying problems that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries as she began to see a disconnect between the scientific and political worlds. This is what drew her to the University of Colorado.

Siân Mooney, smooney@uwyo.edu
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wyoming
Siân Mooney is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming. Her professional interests are in the areas of contract and policy design for carbon sequestration and the representation of uncertainty in integrated assessment modeling among other areas. She serves as a member of the Wyoming Governors Carbon Sequestration Advisory Committee and the Ruckelshaus Institute Energy Planning Group.

Dennis Ojima, dennis@nrel.colostate.edu
Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University
Dennis Ojima is a senior research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. His research interests focus on understanding ecosystem dynamics in relation to earth system science, in particular to changes in climate, land use, and biogeochemical cycles to natural and anthropogenic forces. His research areas include global change effects, both climate and land use changes, on ecosystem dynamics and assessments of climate change on ecosystem dynamics. He coordinated the Central Great Plains Climate Change Assessment for the U.S. National Assessment for Climate Change (1997 – 2001, supported by DOE funding). Current US research activities include contributions to the North American Carbon Project, Member-at-Large for the Governing Board of the Ecological Society of America (2005 through 2007). Recent research activities have been aimed at better integration of social science research in the study of environmental sciences, especially in the area of evaluation of changes in ecosystem services and land use decision making. Currently, he is the co-chair of the planning team responsible for developing the new research strategy for integrating human dimensions and ecological sciences for the study of land processes for the IGBP and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP). He has also been conducting ecosystem studies in Eurasia, including Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and China studying the linkage between the pastoral land use and their environmental system related to changes in recent social, economic, and political conditions affecting grazing systems of the Eurasian steppe.

Steve Pacala, pacala@Princeton.EDU
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
Dr. Pacala completed an undergraduate degree in biology at Dartmouth College in 1978 and a Ph.D. in ecology at Stanford University in 1982. He was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut from 1982 to 1992, and then moved to Princeton University as Professor of Ecology in 1992. He was awarded the Frederick D. Petrie Chair in 2000. He has served on numerous editorial and advisory boards.
Dr. Pacala has researched problems in a wide variety of ecological and mathematical topics. These include the maintenance of biodiversity, the mathematics of scaling, ecosystem modeling, ecological statistics, the dynamics of vegetation, animal behavior, the stability of host-parasitoid interactions, the relationship between biodiversity on ecosystem function, and field studies of plants, lizards, birds, fish, insects, and parasites. Since moving to Princeton University, Dr.
Pacala has focused on problems of global change with an emphasis on the biological regulation of greenhouse gases and climate. He currently co-directs the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

Keith Paustian, keithp@nrel.colostate.edu
Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University
Keith Paustian is Professor of Soil Ecology, Dept. of Soil and Crop Sciences and Senior Research Scientist, Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory (NREL), Colorado State University, Fort Collins. His main fields of interest include agroecosystem ecology, soil organic matter dynamics, global change and greenhouse gas mitigation. He is currently leading research in the US and internationally to elucidate the factors and processes controlling soil carbon dynamics and soil greenhouse gas emissions and to develop better methods to measure and predict changes in soil carbon as a function of management and environmental variables. He is currently as Coordinating Lead Author for the 2006 Revised IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Methods and is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the US Carbon Cycle Science Program.

Alexander Pfaff, ap196@columbia.edu
Columbia University
Dr. Alexander Pfaff is Associate Professor of Economic & International Affairs at Columbia University & Executive Director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at its Earth Institute. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale in 1988 and Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. in 1995. The focus of Dr. Pfaff’s research is interactions between economic activity and the quantity and quality of natural resources and the environment. He has studied deforestation, including implications for carbon sequestration and species habitat, through empirical analysis in the Brazilian Amazon and in Costa Rica. His research also includes: theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of economic development on environmental quality; theoretical and empirical analysis of the incentives for environmental audits and disclosure by firms; and within water projects, empirical analysis of responses to arsenic contamination of drinking water in Bangladesh and evaluation of water management options that make use of forecasts.

Roger Pielke, Jr., pielke@colorado.edu
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado
Roger Pielke, Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES, Roger serves as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Roger's current areas of interest include understanding the politicization of science, decision making under uncertainty, and policy education for scientists. He serves on the Advisory Panel of the NSF Program on Societal Dimensions of Engineering among other advisory committees. In 2000, Roger received the Sigma Xi Distinguished Lectureship Award and in 2001, he received the Outstanding Graduate Advisor Award by students in the University of Colorado's Department of Political Science. Before joining the University of Colorado, from 1993-2001 Roger was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Roger sits on the editorial boards of Policy Sciences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Environmental Science and Policy and Natural Hazards Review. He is author of numerous articles and essays and is also co-author or co-editor of three books.

Andrea Ray, andrea.ray@noaa.gov
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Climate Diagnostics Center
Andrea Ray is a Research Scientist at the NOAA OAR Climate Diagnostics Center, Boulder, CO. She recently completed her doctorate in Geography at the University of Colorado, advised by Bill Travis and Jim Wescoat, on the interaction of climate, reservoir management, and the evolving natural resource management context in Western Colorado, and an analysis of the climate information needs of reservoir managers and the stakeholders in reservoir management. Her research interests are on the potential use of climate information and forecasts in natural resource management, including the analysis of management decision processes and how these factors condition the potential usability of forecasts, and pilot activities for development of NOAA climate services. She participates in the Western Water Assessment, a NOAA-funded integrated assessment designed to identify and characterize regional vulnerabilities to climate variability and change, and to develop information, products and processes to assist water resource decision makers throughout the Intermountain West. She also serves on the Science Working Group for the North American Monsoon Experiment, a project funded by NOAA, NASA, and NSF. Previously, she worked in the NOAA Office of Policy and Strategic Planning, and was a program manager for the NOAA Pan-American Climate Studies research program.

Edwin Sheffner, edwin.j.sheffner@nasa.gov
National Aeronautics and Space Adninistration
Mr. Sheffner is a program manager with the Applied Sciences Program in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. He joined the civil service in 2001. In his current position he is responsible for programs in three national application areas - carbon management, invasive species, and agricultural efficiency. He serves as a representative from NASA on a number of federal government working groups including the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group, the NASA/USDA Interagency Working Group for Earth Science Applications, the Commercial Remote Sensing Space Policy Interagency Working Group, the NSTC/CENR Subcommittee on Ecological Systems, and the National Invasive Species Council.
Mr. Sheffner attained a BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley and a MA in geography from the University of California, Davis. Before joining the civil service, he worked with NASA for more than 25 years in various capacities including principal investigator on projects related to agricultural remote sensing, site manager for a technical support contract with the Earth Science Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and technical support for implementation of the Landsat 7 program and the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. He has taught classes in geography and remote sensing at community colleges and state colleges in California, and held positions with the Universities Space Research Association and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Mr. Sheffner resides in Falls Church, Virginia.

Doug Wickizer, Doug.Wickizer@fire.ca.gov
California Department of Forestry
Mr. Wickizer was granted a bachelor’s degree in Forest Land Management from Northern Arizona University in 1970 at Flagstaff, Arizona. He subsequently worked a short period with the USFS in Region III and then took a job with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in 1973 and has been in their employ since that time. His experience since then includes, Forest Practice Inspector, Forest Practice Review Team Chair, Service Forester, Forest Practice Litigation Coordinator, Environmental Protection Officer for the Department, Regulations Coordinator for the Board and Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Committee Consultant for the Board, Chief of Department Forest Management Program, Administrative Chief for Department South Region, and is currently the Department Chief for Environmental Protection, Regulation, and Forest Product Utilization. The Departments interests and efforts in biomass utilization and Global Climate Change are a portion of his program efforts. He is currently a member of the Society of American Foresters’ and has served in a variety of capacities, including Nor-Cal Section Treasurer, Section Chair for Land use, and Chapter Chair as well as Chapter Treasurer. Mr. Wickizer contributed to the successful conclusion of numerous projects including; major revisions of the Forest Practice Rules during late 80’ and early 90’s, completion of the initial Soil Erosion Study, establishment of the original Board Monitoring Study Group in 1989, The 1996 California Fire Plan, as a contributor to the 2004 FRAP report and writing the current Forestry Protocols for the California Climate Action Registry. Mr. Wickizer is on the Board of Directors for the California Biomass Collaborative, a member of Bio-Energy Working Group for the California Energy Commission, and also a Department representative for the Western Carbon Sequestration Partnership under DOE, http://www.westcarb.org.

Thomas Wilbanks, wilbankstj@ornl.gov
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Thomas J. Wilbanks is a Corporate Research Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and leads the Laboratory’s Global Change and Developing Country Programs. The designation “Corporate Fellow” is roughly equivalent to a chaired professorship in a university, limited to about 25 individuals from a research staff of about 1400. During the periods 1998-2002 and 2005-2006, he has chaired the Laboratory’s Corporate Fellows, serving as ORNL’s chief scientist.
Wilbanks is a past President of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), one of only two non-academics to serve as the president in its 100 years, and has been awarded a number of honors in that field. He conducts research and publishes extensively on such issues as sustainable development, energy and environmental policy, responses to global climate change, and the role of geographical scale in all of these regards. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eight books and more than one hundred journal articles, book chapters, and other open-literature refereed publications.
The global change and developing country programs that Wilbanks coordinates at ORNL have led more than 70 projects in 40 developing countries worldwide in the past two decades. He played roles in the first U.S. National Assessment of Possible Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (1997-2000); the IPCC Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) Third Assessment Report; and aspects of the UNEP et al. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment related to issues of geographic scale. More recently, he is serving as a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report: Working Group II, Chapter 7: Industry, Settlement, and Society. He is a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the U.S. National Research Council, Chair of NRC’s Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change, and a member of a current NRC panel on public participation in environmental assessment and decision-making. He is also a member of the Scientific Steering Group for the U.S. Carbon Cycle Research Program and a member of the Panel on Earth Science Applications and Societal Needs of the NRC “decadal study” of Earth Science and Applications from Space: A Community Assessment and Strategy for the Future.