The group is comprised of faculty in the social and environmental sciences, public health, engineering, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture.
CEEJ Advisory Council members
Current research in the Ackerly lab is focused on studies of climate change impacts on California biodiversity, including distribution modeling, long-term vegetation dynamics and focal studies of selected plant species. Our primary field site is the Pepperwood Preserve, Santa Rosa, CA. Graduate students and post-docs are working on evolution of physiological traits, demography of alpine plants, and species distributions on fine-scale spatial gradients.
Dr. Kammen has parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. He was appointed the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow by Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton in April 2010.
Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, and Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. He has founded or is on the board of over 10 companies, and has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities.
Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell and Harvard, and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He serves on the Advisory Committee for Energy & Environment for the X-Prize Foundation.
During 2010-2011 Kammen served as the World Bank Group’s Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. He was appointed to this newly-created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the Bank’s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution’s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway.
He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports. Dr. Kammen also served for many years on the Technical Review Board of the Global Environment Facility. He is a frequent contributor to or commentator in international news media, including Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. Kammen has appeared on 60 Minutes (twice), Nova, Frontline, and hosted the six-part Discovery Channel series Ecopolis. Dr. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society. In the US, he serves on two National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.
My research focuses on environmental health and environmental justice. I am particularly interested in addressing the double jeopardy faced by communities of color and the poor who experience high exposures to environmental hazards and who are more vulnerable to the toxic effects of pollution due to poverty, malnutrition, discrimination, and underlying health conditions. How do matters of race and class affect distributions of health risks in the United States? What are the causes and consequences of environmental disparities and health inequalities? How can research create "upstream" opportunities for intervention and prevention? I am also interested in evaluating the influence of community participation on environmental health research, science, regulation, and policy-making, as well as in developing methods to foster community-based participatory research.
Kristina Hill is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hill studies urban ecology and hydrology in relationship to physical design and social justice issues. Her primary area of work is in adapting urban districts and shorezones to the new challenges associated with climate change.
In the past, she helped to develop new ideas for urban water system design that support salmon health in the Pacific Northwest. Her involvement as a citizen in urban system advocacy led her to serve as the head of a transit agency in Seattle, after helping to found that agency as a volunteer board member.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she became a member of the Dutch-American engineering and design team that developed New Orleans water management strategy. She continues to collaborate internationally to understand the potential for designs to help protect coastal communities as sea levels rise.
Prof. Hill currently focuses her research on adaptation and coastal design in the San Francisco Bay Area, but engages in comparative studies in the US Mid-Atlantic, Europe, and Hawaii. Professor Hill lectures internationally on urban design and ecology. Before coming to Berkeley, she served as chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Virginia. Her book, Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning, was published by Island Press in 2002, and her current book project proposes adapting urban waterfronts to climate change while incorporating productive ecosystems.
She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Virginia before coming to California. She was honored as a Fellow of the Urban Design Institute in New York, and has conducted research in Stockholm, Sweden, as a Fulbright Scholar.
Core faculty members
I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where I direct the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and serve as a faculty affiliate in the graduate program on Political Economy. I’m also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project (CCP). And I’m a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2021-23).
In 2018-19, I was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2018-19). I’m the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal. I’m currently completing a book project called Street Fight: Climate Change and Inequality in the 21st Century City, under contract with Princeton University Press.
My research and writing have appeared in Nature; Environmental Politics; Public Culture; The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action; NACLA Report on the Americas; The Century Foundation; The Guardian; The Nation; Jacobin; Dissent; and elsewhere.
I work on the politics of climate change, investigating the intersections of climate change, housing, political economy, social movements, and inequalities of race and social class in the United States and Brazil. And I’m working on Green New Deal policy development, including the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, through collaborations between (SC)2, the climate + community project, the McHarg Center, Data for Progress, People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee campaign (where I serve on the policy committee), other social movements, and progressive elected officials in the United States and Brazil.
Dr. Maya Carrasquillo (pronouns: she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and the PI of the JEDI (L)ab. She was previously a Management Consultant at Arcadis U.S. in Atlanta, GA. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida in 2020 and her B.S. in Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015. Her research interests include sustainable and equitable urban water infrastructure, food-energy-water systems (FEWs), community-engagement and citizen science in decision-making, and environmental/social justice. She is a certified Envision Sustainability Professional (ENV SP). She is also a College of Engineering Huelskamp Faculty Fellow.
Youjin B. Chung is Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (Division of Society and Environment).
Rural sociologist and human-environment geographer by training, her research lies at the intersection of the political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, African studies, and science and technology studies/feminist science studies. She draws on ethnographic, archival, and participatory visual methods to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and agrarian-environmental change in Sub Saharan Africa with a focus on Tanzania. She is interested in understanding how agrarian landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles articulate with capitalist forces, and how these processes of uneven encounter reshape the identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.
She is currently completing a book project, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures, which examines the gendered processes and outcomes of a stalled large-scale agricultural land deal in coastal Tanzania. Her second project investigates the role of gender, race, species, and science in the making of the “livestock revolution” in Tanzania and the wider region.
Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley, Dr. Chung taught at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She holds a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University and a M.Phil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Zoé Hamstead is an assistant professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning. Her work focuses on environmental planning, sustainability, urban governance, and environmental justice, particularly in the context of climate change. She uses mixed methods, including field-based data collection with sensing equipment, interviews, focus groups, participatory action research, geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and other approaches for understanding the social justice dimensions of urban climate. Her work has been published in planning and interdisciplinary journals including Ecological Indicators, Landscape & Urban Planning, Computers, Environment, & Urban Systems, Ecology & Society, among others.
Current and past research projects, practice, and service learning courses include analysis of access to urban parks and ecological amenities, urban resilience scenario development, engaged community solar planning, and climate-exacerbated extreme heat management. Through a project entitled Sensing and Sensitivity, she integrates experiential data on people’s perceptions, subjectivities, capacities, and adaptive practices with objective measures of urban radiative temperature and other thermal indicators to understand residential thermal insecurities. Her recent co-edited volume entitled Resilient Urban Futures describes the processes of developing long-range planning capacities for climate resilience in 9 cities across Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America through six years of coordinated participatory scenario workshops. In particular, she engages in co-production approaches to develop integrative governance frameworks for heat (and more broadly, thermal) management. Her in-progress project, Critical Heat Studies, applies tenets of racial justice developed within legal and educational theory to understand why thermal insecurity has long been neglected as a fundamental environmental threat and social determinant of health, although it is deadlier than all other weather-related disasters. Hazards protection practices tend to be primarily oriented around protecting against property destruction, a highly visible outcome of extreme storm events. By contrast, thermal insecurity is often a highly personal or private experience that we struggle to represent visually and linguistically. Critical Heat Studies brings together multiple epistemologies to understand the often invisible ways that thermal threats are produced in urban physical, institutional, and socio-cognitive spaces, and to develop a political framework for addressing it as a critical environmental burden.
Prior to joining the faculty at DCRP, Dr. Hamstead was an assistant professor of environmental planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she founded the Community Resilience Lab and served as director for the masters of urban planning specialization in environmental planning. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a local government land use planner and in educational development at the American Planning Association.
Dr. Cesunica Ivey is an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and the PI of the Air Quality Modeling and Exposure Lab. She was formerly an assistant professor in the Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Nevada Reno through 2017 and was also a visiting scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the spring of 2018. Her research centers on atmospheric modeling, source apportionment, data assimilation, exposure monitoring, and environmental justice applications. Dr. Ivey was recently honored as part of the C&EN Talented 12 Class of 2021.
Laura (Layla) Kwong is an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health focused on global environmental health equity. An engineer by training, Dr. Kwong uses human-centered design principles to develop engineering interventions that address public health issues in low-income countries, particularly issues related to air pollution and infectious diseases, with a special focus on children.As part of her extensive fieldwork, Dr. Kwong has lived and worked with project partners in Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, Mongolia, Peru, and Uganda for 2 of the past 8 years. Recent and planned projects include a randomized-controlled trial of face masks to prevent transmission of COVID-19, an evaluation of liquid propane gas as a replacement for biomass in the Rohingya refugee camp; refugee housing, reducing respiratory disease in densely-packed, low-income neighborhoods; animal-inclusive community-led total sanitation; and container-based sanitation.
Dr. Kwong received a PhD in Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to her time at Stanford, Dr. Kwong worked on water security and national water quality standards as an ORISE Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Meg Mills-Novoa is an assistant professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment and the Energy and Resources Group. As a human-environment geographer, her research focuses on the enduring impact of climate change adaptation projects. To study these initiatives, she uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, from spatial analysis and quantitative surveys to archival research and interviews. She collaborates closely with communities and practitioners to improve the design, implementation, and outcomes of adaptation projects that promote inclusion and equity.
Reflecting her interest in human dimensions of global change across the Americas, she also has a parallel research project on environmental change in the Amazon. Currently, she is the co-PI of an interdisciplinary research team that is funded by the National Center for Socio-Environmental Synthesis. Their project merges critical discourse analysis, remote sensing, and predictive land use modeling to understand the diverse drivers and proposed solutions to deforestation in the Amazon.
Prior to joining Berkeley, Dr. Mills-Novoa worked for over a decade as an adaptation researcher and practitioner, first as a Fulbright Fellow studying climate change impacts on Chilean vineyards and then as a Luce Scholar placed with the Centre for Rural Development in northern Vietnam. Most recently, she served as the outreach coordinator for the Climate Impacts Research Consortium at Oregon State University.
Ajay Pillarisetti, currently an assistant professor of public health at Emory University and also an alumnus of the Berkeley School of Public Health, researches how household energy use impacts human health, the environment, and the climate. In particular, he investigates pollution exposure, and how low-cost sensor technologies can enhance monitoring, evaluation, and control of environmental pollutants. He will join the School of Public Health in January 2022.
Danielle is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California Berkeley.
Her research examines and addresses environmental injustice and climate inequity in low-income communities of color. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Chris Schell studies the intersections of society, ecology, and evolution to understand how wildlife (mainly mammalian carnivores) are rapidly adapting to life in cities. The work of the Schell lab combines behavioral, physiological, and genomic approaches to demonstrate the myriad consequences of historical and contemporary inequites on organismal, population, and community-level dynamics of wildlife. In addition, Dr. Schell and his lab leverage human dimensions and community-engaged data streams to decipher how wildlife adaptation and human perceptions create landscapes of risk that contribute to human-carnivore conflict. This interdisciplinary work requires integrating principles from the natural sciences with urban studies to address how systemic racism and oppression affect urban ecosystems, while simultaneously highlighting the need to environmental justice, civil rights, and equity as the bedrock of biological conservation and our fight against the climate crisis.
