Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 1-10 of 41 Results
-
Marvin Browne
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioAmong the many constituents of a plant’s environment, water is critical to the functionality of most of a plant’s physiological processes. Given the uncertainty in global climate change's impact on plant species, my work aims to enhance our understanding of how plant physiological traits inform individual, species-level, and ecosystem responses to water stress. I use plant physiological methods and knowledge along with remote sensing tools to address scaling of variation physiology within and across species.
-
Paul Berne Burow
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioI am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. I am an interdisciplinary social-environmental scientist studying how human communities are impacted by environmental change. My work examines the cultural dynamics of environmental change in North America across scales using mixed methods from ethnography and archival research to field ecology and spatial analysis. My postdoctoral project explores the social dimensions and institutional effectiveness of collaborative forest stewardship with federal agencies and Native Nations in California.
My previous work examined the social and cultural dimensions of environmental change in the North America's Great Basin. Based on thirty-six months of field-based ethnographic and historical research in California and Nevada, it investigated the cultural politics of land and its stewardship in dryland forest and shrub steppe ecosystems as it intersected with a changing climate, land use histories, and environmental governance regimes. Landscapes are undergoing material transformation due to climate change, land use practices, and colonialism, in turn reshaping how people relate to land, substantiate their place on it, and make claims to territory. This is creating new social-ecological configurations of people, land, and place I call ecologies of belonging, the subject of my current book manuscript.
Broadly, my research program addresses the sociocultural dimensions of climate and land use change, climate adaptation, and community-based land stewardship across North America. My areas of research and teaching interest include environmental anthropology, Indigenous environmental sciences/studies, ethnoecology, and human-environment geography. I am also engaged in community-based participatory research projects with Tribal Nations to expand Indigenous-led land stewardship and protect cultural landscapes from degradation for the benefit of future generations. -
Pablo Busch
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioDr. Pablo Busch is an interdisciplinary researcher with training in industrial and environmental engineering, public policy, energy systems, industrial ecology, and statistics. His research broadly focuses on scientific analyses to support a clean energy transition, and to help identify risks to equity and sustainability in the emerging energy transition mineral supply chain. Pablo's main research goal is to conduct scientific analysis to diverse environmental and climate change problems, and to translate key insights from research into a digestible and actionable format for decision-making. His research is fueled by tools from engineering, statistics, geographic information systems, economics and public policy.
-
Jing Cheng
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioPostdoctoral Scholar | climate change impacts and adaption | net-zero energy and food systems | air pollution | CDR |
-
Xinyu Dou
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioStanford Energy Fellow
-
Dapeng Feng
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioDapeng Feng is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth System Science and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. During his PhD he developed the differentiable hydrologic modeling framework to unify machine learning and physical models for large-scale water cycle simulations and streamflow forecasting. His current research interests focus on systematically integrating AI, physical models, and big earth observations for large-scale geoscientific modeling and knowledge discovery, particularly in characterizing the terrestrial water cycle and its interactions with plant and climate systems.
-
Melanie Gittard
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an applied environmental and development economist studying the impacts of climate change and water pollution in sub-Saharan Africa.
-
Alex Hedgpeth
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioAlexandra Hedgpeth is a biogeochemist whose research explores how soil carbon cycling in peatlands responds to environmental change. Her work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate carbon storage and greenhouse gas production in both tropical and boreal wetlands, with a particular emphasis on the vulnerability of deep, ancient carbon to modern surface inputs and hydrologic shifts.
Through her Ph.D. research at the University of California, Los Angeles, Alex has developed and applied novel isotopic and geochemical approaches—including implementing radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analyses, and high-resolution molecular characterization—to trace the sources and fates of carbon in peat soils. Her fieldwork spans a range of ecosystems, from ombrotrophic bogs in the Arctic to saturated tropical peat domes in Central America. This comparative framework allows her to identify unifying controls on carbon preservation and loss across climate zones.
Alex's research integrates field measurements, laboratory experiments, and synthesis of global datasets. She is a key contributor to multi-institutional efforts to model peatland carbon cycling under climate change scenarios, including DOE- and NSF-supported initiatives. Her work helps clarify the role of peatlands as both long-term carbon sinks and potential sources of atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ under future disturbance.
In addition to her scientific contributions, Alex is committed to collaborative, interdisciplinary research and has worked closely with partners at national laboratories, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and international data synthesis networks. She is especially interested in questions with high uncertainty and high relevance to climate feedbacks—such as thresholds in biogeochemical function and the persistence of deep soil carbon under hydrologic change.
