Post-Baccalaureate Mentors

Current Faculty Mentors

AMir AghaKouchak

Chancellor's Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research interests: Understanding, evaluating, and predicting climate extremes including compound and cascading hazards and their societal impacts.

Jane Baldwin

Professor, Earth System Science Research interests: The intersection of climate dynamics and extreme event (e.g., tropical cyclone) risk; computational modeling and data analysis

Dominic Bednar

Assistant Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy
Research interests: Institutional barriers of energy poverty recognition and response in the United States; spatial, racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic patterns of residential energy affordability, consumption, and efficiency

Benis Egoh

Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: Exploring the ecosystem service benefits for communities of different restoration scenarios across an understudied and ecologically important region of the Congo Basin; mapping the distribution of recreational services in California; researching sustainability in the oil palm sector in Africa.

Doug Houston

Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy
Research interests: Conducting geographical and statistical analysis of a survey of households along the wildland urban interface regarding their perceptions of wildfire, flood, and mudslide risks; mapping climate hazards for vulnerable communities and examining climate action and environmental justice city plans in Southern California; Surveying students regarding climate anxiety; analysis of recently-funded Reconnecting Communities projects to address historic and ongoing impacts of freeway construction through disadvantaged communities.

KATHLEEN
JOHNSON

Professor, Earth System Science, Principal Investigator
Research interests: Use of geochemical variations preserved in cave-calcite deposits (speleothems) to reconstruct time-series of past environmental changes; methods include paleoclimatology analytical techniques (e.g. microsampling, analytical chemistry, mass spectrometry, laser ablation, etc.) along with laboratory experiments, rigorous data analysis, and geochemical modeling.

STEVE
ALLISON

Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Earth System Science, Co-Principal Investigator
Research interests: Modeling soil carbon storage/sequestration and climate feedbacks; land conservation, restoration, and stewardship in the context of climate change, including the functional roles of microbes and plants; community-based research on climate action and governance needs in the Southern California region, primarily through WUICAN (Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network) and associated partners

Christopher Olivares Martinez

Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research interests: Environmental biotechnology, remediation, metabolomics, pollutant fate in natural and engineered systems, microbial toxicity, environmental organic chemistry

Henri Drake

Assistant Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: Dynamics and kinematics of ocean turbulence, theories of large-scale ocean circulation, the ocean’s role in the climate system, and numerical Earth System modeling

James Randerson

Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: Wildfires, the global carbon cycle, biogeochemistry, climate-carbon feedbacks, climate change impacts in western North America, machine learning, artificial intelligence, land cover change, deforestation, drought, Amazon forests, satellite remote sensing

Jun Wu

Professor, Environmental & Occupational Health
Research interests: Population-based research of environmental exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, and environmental health disparity. Collaboration with local and regional community partners on environmental justice issues related to air pollution, soil contamination, and climate change

Prospective Faculty Mentors

Manijeh Berenji

Assistant Clinical Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health
Research interests: Occupational and environmental health, climate translational research and risk communication

Claudia czimczik

Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: Agriculture (e.g., urban gardening, farming, and composting), wildland restoration, improving ecosystem function in urban/managed environments; tracking of changes in fossil fuel-derived greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions; geochemical analyses

Alex Guenther

Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: High-resolution measurements and modeling activities to identify the sources, distributions, and impacts of urban air pollutants, with a focus on volatile organic compounds (VOCs)

michael Kleinman

Adjunct Professor, Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH) School of Medicine
Research interests: Air pollution health effects and climate related changes; Community exposures to particles and gases from local and regional sources; Changes in heart and lung physiology related to changes in temperature, PM exposure, and diet.

Mukul Kumar

Assistant Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy
Research interests: Decarbonization, political ecology of energy transitions, development, land politics, and environmental justice

Adam Martiny

Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Research interests: Responses of plankton growth and marine ecosystems to contaminants and climate change

Richard Matthew

Associate Dean & Professor
Research interests: Climate change and its connection to: indigenous peoples, public health in Malawi, forced displacement, and flood risk modeling

Kailen Mooney

Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Research interests: Plant and insect ecology and response to drought and climate change, habitat management through work with UCI Nature.

Tiara naputi

Assistant Professor, Global and International Studies
Research interests: Environmental humanities, community-based participatory research, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and climate change

Eric Saltzman

Professor, Earth System Science
Research interests: Analysis of ancient polar ice cores to understand past changes in atmospheric composition and human impact on the planet. Hydrogen records give clues for the climate impact of the future hydrogen economy while acetylene records help reconstruct the history of global fire

Cascade Sorte

Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Research interests: Impacts of global change on species in marine ecosystems

Nicola Ulibarri

Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy
Research interests: Water resource management, coastal resilience, and infrastructure siting; adaptive and equitable environmental governance