Office of Education & Diversity ProgramsThis workshop was organized by the Ecological Society of America, Education & Diversity Programs Office and the following planning committee members:
Alan Collins is a Professor and Chair of the Agricultural and Resource Economics program at West Virginia University. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in environmental and natural resource economics along with serving as undergraduate coordinator. His research areas include: water quality and watershed management; agricultural waste management; and environmental attitudes and risk perceptions. His over fifty publications include papers in Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics,Contemporary Economic Policy, Journal of Environmental Management, Review of Agricultural Economics, Risk Analysis, and Water Resources Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Oregon State University.
Bill Dennison is Vice President for Science Applications, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Bill leads the Integration and Application Network (IAN), a collection of scientists and science communicators interested in solving, not just studying environmental problems. His interest in environmental problem solving is focused on coastal regions of the world, with a focus on Chesapeake Bay. The IAN team teaches science communication courses globally and has active partnerships with government agencies and non-government organizations. The IAN group publishs books and papers on a wide diversity of marine topics, in a spectrum of peer reviewed scientific journals to more generally accessible science communication products. Bill’s research expertise is in the ecophysiology of marine plants, but has considerably broader interests and experience. He established active groups of science integrators and communicators in both Australia and the US.
Andrew Elmore is an Associate Professor at University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. He works broadly across issues relevant to global environmental change, with a particular focus on landscape ecology, biogeochemical cycling in watersheds, and the management of land and water. He applies an array of tools to these problems, including remote sensing data analysis and Geographical Information Science (GIS). Dr. Elmore received a BSc in Applied Physics from Purdue University and an MSc and PhD in Geoscience from Brown University. He is now Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Brian Wee is the Chief of External Affairs at NEON, Inc. He is the organization’s liaison to Congress, US Federal agencies, and other scientific organizations. He also represents the informatics needs of the large-scale environmental sciences before the computer science and Federal data community. Brian holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the University of Texas at Austin, a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science – Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and a B.Sc. in Information Systems and Computer Science from the National University of Singapore. His M.Sc. studies focused on designing and implementing computer augmented learning solutions for high-school classrooms and corporate training at the Institute for the Learning Sciences. His Ph.D. focused on investigating the relative effects of behavioral, physiological and landscape barriers on the genetic structure of insect populations by integrating genetic, behavioral, and GIS analyses.
Michael A. Reiter is Associate Professor of Environmental Science at Bethune-Cookman University, where he serves as Director of the B. J. Moore Center for Integrated Environmental Science and Chair of the Department of Integrated Environmental Science (graduate and undergraduate). His primary research is in integrated ecosystem management, focusing on the development and application of stakeholder-based methods for addressing wicked environmental problems from a systems perspective. Dr. Reiter has received multiple university and national awards for his teaching and research, and has been invited to speak on his work on four continents, including an opening symposium of the 2012 Rio+20 Summit. He is a past President and current Counselor for the Interdisciplinary Environmental Association, Associate Editor for the international journal Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, and co-chair of the Roundtable on Environmental Systems and Sustainability. His goal is to emphasize the importance of making scientifically informed, broadly based decisions concerning present and future environmental concerns, and to help ensure that such scientifically informed individuals exist in the near future. Dr. Reiter holds a B.S. in Biology from Muskingum College in Ohio, an M.S. in Biology (Ecology) from Kent State University in Ohio, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia.
Allen D. Roberts is an Assistant Professor and program leader within the undergraduate and graduate studies of Applied Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) of Tennessee State University’s Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Before taking this position, Dr. Roberts had over 19 years of ecological, hydrological, geospatial, and environmental research and project experiences. These experiences spanned the academic, non-profit, federal government, and private sectors and included being a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 1890-Scholar with the Forest Service (various locations), a Project Manager with the Water Environment Federation (Alexandria, VA), a Project Consultant with Alliance Environmental, LLC (Hillsborough, NJ) and a Staff Environmental Scientist with Dynamac Corp (Rockville, MD). Since 2005, Dr. Roberts has instructed several courses in GIS, environmental remote sensing, meteorology, environmental science, and climate-based energy sources within the University of Maryland, Coppin State University, Fayetteville State University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Morehouse College. Dr. Roberts completed his B.S. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and his M.S. in Geography (Hydroclimate Focus) from the University of Delaware and his PhD at the University of Maryland in Geographical Sciences.
Carla Restrepo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology of the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. She integrates Landscape Ecology and Macroecology into her research program aimed at understanding processes that shape tropical landscapes. In Guatemala she examines the contribution of land-cover change and landsliding to carbon cycling. Dr. Restrepo teaches undergraduate (General Ecology, Landscape Ecology) and graduate (Large-scale Ecology: Pattern, Process, and Diversity) courses and thrives to strengthen students’ communication and quantitative skills. After completing her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Zoology at the University of Florida, Dr. Restrepo spent her post-doctoral years at Stanford University and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Restrepo completed her B.Sc. at the Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia where she gained a deep appreciation for the tropics.
Leah Wasser is a University, Senior Science Educator at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) in Boulder, Colorado. Leah has a Ph.D. in Remote Sensing Ecology and a masters on ecological planning from Penn State University. She is passionate about remote sensing (and other geospatial) data. Her research utilizes LiDAR remote sensing methods to detect and characterize riparian forests and to furthermore quantify landscape / watershed level disturbance impacts. Leah has over 10 years of University teaching and course development experience in the areas of spatially driven (GIS) ecological analysis, GPS and ecological planning. She is also interested in creative 3-D visualization techniques of spatial data to demonstrate the ecological impacts of disturbance.
J. Cho is Associate Professor of Environmental Science at Bethune-Cookman University (B-CU), Daytona Beach, FL. Cho is a coastal scientist who specializes in application of remote sensing data to the underwater/aquatic environment and coastal habitats. She published over 40 peer reviewed and invited articles, book chapters, field guide books on remote sensing of seagrass mapping and water correction algorithms, and coastal environment. She has extensive research experience on coastal waters and underwater habitats in the Gulf of Mexico (> 13 years) garnered through numerous completed and on-going projects funded by NASA, the Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sea Grant, the Department of Marine Resources, and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance. She has conducted research and published extensively in both disciplines of coastal biology, ecology, and remote sensing.