Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 1-16 of 16 Results
-
Katharine (Kate) Maher
Professor of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHydrology, reactive transport modeling and environmental geochemistry
-
Laura Mansfield
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioI am interested in how machine learning and Bayesian statistics can assist our understanding and prediction of the climate and weather. My current research focuses on improving gravity wave parameterizations in atmospheric circulation models, which are necessary to capture the subgrid-scale gravity waves that influence the middle atmosphere dynamics. Machine learning can be used to either improve existing physics-based parameterizations, i.e. through calibration, or to replace these entirely with novel machine learning alternatives. I work on both of these approaches and am particularly interested in exploring uncertainties arising from parameterizations.
Previously, I completed my PhD at the University of Reading, which focused on emulating climate models to estimate the surface temperature response to changes in anthropogenic forcings, including both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived aerosol pollutants. Prior to this, I completed the Mathematics of Planet Earth MRes at University of Reading, after coming from an undergraduate degree in Physics at Imperial College London. Outside of work, my interests include cycling, running and being outdoors in California. -
Pamela Matson
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute, Emerita
BioPAMELA MATSON is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, academic leader, and organizational strategist. She served as dean of Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences from 2002-2017, building interdisciplinary departments and educational programs focused on resources, environment and sustainability, as well as co-leading university-wide interdisciplinary initiatives. In her current role as the Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, she leads the graduate program on Sustainability Science and Practice. Her research addresses a range of environment and sustainability issues, including sustainability of agricultural systems, vulnerability and resilience of particular people and places to climate change, and characteristics of science that can contribute to sustainability transitions at scale.
Dr. Matson serves as chair of the board of the World Wildlife Fund-US and as a board member of the World Wildlife Fund-International and several university advisory boards. She served on the US National Academy of Science Board on Sustainable Development and co-wrote the National Research Council’s volume Our Common Journey: A transition toward sustainability (1999); she also led the NRC committee on America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change. She was the founding chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and founding editor for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. She is a past President of the Ecological Society of America. Her recent publications (among around 200) include Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution (2012) and Pursuing Sustainability (2016).
Pam is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a AAAS Fellow. She received a MacArthur Foundation Award, contributed to the award of the Nobel Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other awards and recognitions, and is an Einstein Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Matson holds a Bachelor of Science degree with double majors in Biology and Literature from the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire), a Master degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Doctorate in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University, and honorary doctorates from Princeton, McGill and Arizona State Universities. She spent ten years as a research scientist with NASA-Ames Research Center before moving to a professorship at the University of California Berkeley and, in 1997, to Stanford University. -
Anna M. Michalak
Professor (By Courtesy), Earth System Science
BioDr. Anna M. Michalak is the Founding Director of the Carnegie Climate and Resilience Hub at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where she has been a Faculty Member since 2011 and served as Director of the Department of Global Ecology for 2020-2023. Michalak also holds appointments as Professor (by courtesy) in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was the Frank and Brooke Transue Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.Sc.(Eng.) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Guelph, Canada.
Dr. Michalak studies the cycling and emissions of greenhouse gases at the Earth surface at urban to global scales – scales directly relevant to informing climate and policy – primarily through the use of atmospheric observations that provide the clearest constraints at these critical scales. She also explores climate change impacts on freshwater and coastal water quality via influences on nutrient delivery to, and on conditions within, water bodies. Her approach is highly data-driven, with a common methodological thread being the development and application of spatiotemporal statistical data fusion methods for optimizing the use of limited in situ and remote sensing environmental data.
She is the lead author of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan, Co-Chair of the National Academies committee for the midterm assessment of the NASA decadal survey for Earth system observations from space, Co-Chair of the carbon and water advisory boards for Schmidt Sciences, Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, and Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research. Previously, she was Editor of the journal Water Resources Research and Chair of the scientific advisory board for the European Integrated Carbon Observation System. She is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (nominated by NASA), the NSF CAREER award, the Leopold Fellowship in environmental leadership, and the American Geophysical Union’s Simpson Medal. -
Diana Moanga
Lecturer
BioDiana Moanga is a Lecturer and the Manager of the Spatial Analysis Center in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She teaches the Remote Sensing of Land class and the Fundamentals of Geographic Information Science class. Her research includes studying land use land cover change processes using remote sensing and spatial analysis, focusing on the effects of environmental and anthropogenic stressors on coastal socio-environmental systems. She is particularly passionate about furthering our understating of climate equity for coastal communities and mapping coastal hazards at various scales. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Science Policy and Management from UC Berkeley in 2020. Her dissertation research used geospatial techniques to study land use and land cover changes across California. Specifically, her research explored management impacts on California’s coastal lands, agricultural transitions in the Central Valley, and wildfire activity under future climate regimes. Diana also earned a Master’s in Science in Marine Affairs and Policy from the University of Miami in 2015. For her master's research she examined the spatial and temporal characteristics of harmful algal blooms and studied coastal zone management and coral conservation.
