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Research
Interests
For the
past four years, I have been engaged in post-doctoral research
in ecology and environmental policy, affiliated with both the Energy
and
Resources Group at the University
of California, Berkeley,
and the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab. Previously, I earned my PhD in Chemical
Engineering
and conducted interdisciplinary research at the academic and industry
levels in
microfluidics and microsensors, solving problems using biomimetic
techniques
inspired by nature. I have since shifted
my research interests from the microscale to the scale of the earth,
but I
continue to be fascinated by patterns that are hidden.
I led colleagues at U. C. Berkeley in
developing an income-based framework to analyze humanity’s
consumption of nature’s services. Our
work shows how the world’s citizens may bear differing levels of
responsibility
for ecological degradation. Our results
for six major forms of ecological harm— climate change, ozone layer
depletion,
damages from agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation,
overfishing, and mangrove loss— indicate serious geographic mismatches
between
bearers of harm and consumers of related goods (i.e.,
those vulnerable to climate change impacts, and users of
fossil fuels). I have also studied
spatial patterns of species richness using nestedness metrics and Prof.
John
Harte’s macroecological HEAP theory, focusing in the former on how
species’
diets within their food webs relate to their success across landscapes. Currently, I am very interested in
communicating ecology in education, and exploring means of conveying
the meaning
and beauty of food webs against the backdrop of the ongoing destruction
of
nature. |