Jose Alfaro is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Practice at the School for Environment and Sustainability. He has degrees in Chemical and Environmental Engineering and in Natural Resource Management and Policy.
Dr. Alfaro’s scholarship revolves around three main efforts:
- Using Circular Economy at the small-scale to increase communities’ sustainability and well-being
- Deploying renewable energy for sustainable development of least industrialized countries, in particular using gasification of agricultural residues
- Developing tools for policy and decision-making through computer modeling of socio-technical systems
His work uses quantitative tools (such as Agent-Based Modeling, Life-Cycle Assessment and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis), and design tools for community development while also having expertise in prototyping and deployment of new technologies. His applied focus has led him to work closely with communities, industry, NGO’s, and government organizations.
He is also the founder and faculty director of Sustainability Without Borders, an interdisciplinary organization that works with communities to develop ethical partnerships that enhance sustainability. This organization labors to provide students with a meaningful engaged experience that also increases the capacity of the communities and NGO’s it works with and increases their well-being.
Dr. Todd Allen is Professor at the University of Michigan and a Senior Fellow at Third Way, a DC base Think Tank, supporting their Clean Energy Portfolio. He was the Deputy Director for Science and Technology at the Idaho National Laboratory from January 2013 through January 2016. Prior to INL he was a Professor in the Engineering Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin, a position held from September 2003 through December 2012 and again from January 2016-December 2018. From March 2008-December 2012, he was concurrently the Scientific Director of the Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility at INL. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin, he was a Nuclear Engineer at Argonne National Laboratory-West in Idaho Falls. His Doctoral Degree is in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan (1997) and his Bachelor’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering is from Northwestern University (1984). Prior to graduate work, he was an officer in the United States Navy Nuclear Power Program.
Jesse Austin-Breneman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. Previous to his academic career, he worked as a development engineer in Peru, working with rural communities on alternative business opportunities and with local doctors’ groups on medical device development. He also spent two years as a high school mathematics teacher in Boston, MA. His recent research as the director of the Global Design Laboratory focuses on developing design processes and support tools to help multi-disciplinary design teams think at a systems-level when performing complex system design tasks. This includes investigating the best way to incorporate system-level interactions between stakeholders in emerging markets into the design decision-making process.
Robert Axelrod is the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. He has appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His books include "The Evolution of Cooperation," "The Complexity of Cooperation," and "Harnessing Complexity" (with Michael D. Cohen).
Axelrod's recent work focuses on how people (especially political elites) make sense out of novel situations. He draws on a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, psychology, and artificial intelligence. He also has long term interests in international security affairs including cyber issues and Middle East politics.
Axelrod is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a MacArthur Prize Fellow. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and received his PhD from Yale University. For more information, including a curriculum vitae and access to selected research papers, see Robert Axelrod's personal home page.
Avik Basu is a faculty member in the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), focusing on the behavioral side of environmental challenges. His recent work focuses on climate adaptation in the developing world through scenario planning, differences between experts and laypeople in environmental decision-making, the role environments play in depleting and restoring our capacity to pay attention, and designing environments that simultaneously enhance individual and communal well-being. Over the last 15 years, he has been part of a collaborative effort to develop a framework, known as Supportive Environments for Effectiveness, to help practitioners from various disciplines create conditions that meet human informational needs. He co-edited/co-authored a book on these topics called Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing out our Best.
Since 2015, Avik has directed the University of Michigan delegation to the annual United Nations Climate Conference. He teaches a course on the United Nations climate regime and another on social research methods for environment and sustainability. He also serves as the faculty advisor for Climate Blue, a student organization that connects international climate policy with local climate action at UM and the surrounding communities. Avik earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology and a Master’s/Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering, all from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Rosina Bierbaum is a Professor and Dean Emerita of the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment (now School for Environment and Sustainability) and the Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics at the University of Maryland. She chairs the Science and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility, and serves as a Science Adviser to the Global Adaptation Commission. Bierbaum’s experience extends from climate science into foreign relations and international development. Rosina served for two decades in both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government, and ran the first Environment Division of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She served on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, as an Adaptation Fellow at the World Bank, and co-author of the 2010 World Development Report on Climate Change. Bierbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Ecological Society of America, and Sigma Xi
Elizabeth Popp Berman is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in sociology at Berkeley, and was previously a faculty member at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is author of "Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine" (Princeton University Press 2012), which won several awards, and is currently finishing a second book, "Thinking Like an Economist: How Economics Became the Language of Public Policy." She is a consulting editor of the American Journal of Sociology and on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review and Engaging Science, Technology and Society. She is interested in how expertise is used in public policy, in how numbers are used in organizations, and in disciplinary responses to the reproducibility crisis, among other topics.
Bilal Butt is faculty member in the new School for Environment and Sustainability and a faculty affiliate of the African Studies Center. His research is concerned with the political ecology of pastoralism and protected areas in East Africa. He places a large emphasis on empirical fieldwork to understand the lived geographies of the interactions between pastoralists and wildlife in ecologically diverse regions. He combines various geospatial technologies (such as putting GPS units on cows) with historical and ecological dynamics of dryland environments to understand how people, wildlife and livestock are coping with and adapting to changes in climate and politics. He is also interested in the ways that scientific and technical appraisals of rangeland peoples and environments have misread the landscape, leading to orientalist approaches to development programs. Dr. Butt is an NSF Career Award winner and has published in diverse journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Remote Sensing of Environment, Journal of Applied Ecology and Humanity. He teaches courses on Conservation and Development, Political Ecology, Environmental Security and Conflict, and Environmental Governance.
Michael Craig is an Assistant Professor of Energy Systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability. He primarily researches how to reduce global and local environmental impacts of electric power and other energy systems. In prior work, he quantified the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction potential of new technologies, such as rooftop solar, grid-scale batteries, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). He focuses on system-level analysis to understand the deployment potential and operations of new technologies given the technical, regulatory, and economic constraints and features of the larger system in which they are embedded. Through system analyses, his research also illuminates how the operations and evolution of energy systems respond to new technologies and other factors, e.g. nonstationary environmental conditions induced by climate change. Michael’s research is often interdisciplinary and involves collaborations with economists, climate scientists, and others.
Melissa Creary is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, Department of Health Management and Policy. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) at Emory University. She also received a B.S. in Biology and Masters in Public Health at Emory. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of public health, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology. She studies the social, cultural, ethical, political and historic tensions of sickle cell disease (SCD) in both the United States and Brazil. In her most recent project, she analyzes how frameworks of biology, social determinants, and policy respond to Brazilian cultural and historical ideas about race, health, identity, and legitimacy. She has been published in Genetics in Medicine, the Huffington Post, and The Journal of Bioethics and was recognized recently by the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America with the National Champion Advocacy award.
John M. DeCicco is a research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute where he addresses energy and environmental challenges through an interdisciplinary approach anchored in physical science while drawing insights from economics and other social sciences. His focus is transportation energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, including vehicle efficiency, consumer issues, petroleum use, biofuels, electrification and the need to offset the CO2 released from liquid fuel combustion. He has analyzed automotive fuel economy and emissions regulations, renewable fuel policies and methodological issues related to biofuels and atmospheric CO2 levels.
Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2009, he spent over twenty years working on energy and environmental policy at nonprofit organizations, including positions as senior fellow for automotive strategies at the Environmental Defense Fund and transportation director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. He has testified many times before Congress and has over 150 published papers, reports and formal public comments to his credit. John holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Princeton University, where he conducted research at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies.
Robert Goodspeed, PhD, AICP, is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS), collaborative planning, urban informatics, and scenario planning theory and methods. Within these areas, he has investigated how urban practitioners can effectively use new information technologies, the effectiveness of new practices like online civic crowdfunding, and how urban scenarios can be used to manage uncertainty. He holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.C.P. from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in history from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, which examined the use of planning support systems in spatial planning, received the 2013 Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. His undergraduate thesis, a case study of Detroit's Gratiot Area Redevelopment Project from the early 1950s, sparked his interest in cities and urban planning. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and serves as a board member of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, and initiative of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Ben Green is an Assistant Professor in the Ford School and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics (with a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society) from Harvard University. Ben studies the social and political impacts of government algorithms, with a focus on algorithmic fairness, smart cities, and the criminal justice system. His book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, was published in 2019 by MIT Press. Ben is also an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
Robert C. Hampshire is an associate professor of public policy at the Ford School, a research associate professor in both the U-M Transportation Research Institute's (UMTRI) Human Factors group and Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE). He develops and applies operations research, data science, and systems approaches to public and private service industries. His research focuses on the management and policy analysis of emerging networked industries and innovative mobility services such as smart parking, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, bike sharing, and car sharing. He has worked extensively with both public and private sector partners worldwide. He is a queueing theorist that uses statistics, stochastic modeling, simulation and dynamic optimization. Hampshire received a PhD in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.
Catherine H. Hausman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Her work focuses on environmental and energy economics. Her research has appeared in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Recent projects have looked at the economic and environmental impacts of shale gas; the market impacts of nuclear power plant closures; and the effects of electricity market deregulation on nuclear power safety. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied in Peru under a Fulbright grant. She has taught Statistics, a policy seminar on Energy and the Environment, and a course on Government Regulation of Industry and the Environment. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Joel Howell, MD, PhD, MACP, has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan since 1984. In addition to being the Director of the Medical Arts Program, he is a Senior Associate Director of the University of Michigan Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, the Elizabeth Farrand Professor of the History of Medicine, and a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine (Medical School), History (College of LSA), and Health Management and Policy (School of Public Health). He earned his medical degree from the University of Chicago and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals. At the University of Pennsylvania he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He completed his doctorate in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Howell’s research interests focus on the history of medical technology and the medical humanities. He has written widely on the use of medical technology, examining the social and contextual factors relevant to its clinical application and diffusion, analyzing why American medicine has become so obsessed with the use of medical technology. He has recently published on the history of the fiberoptic endoscope and on diagnostic errors to be learned from a near-apocalyptic cold war miscalculation. Recent projects have started to explore the history of medical education in Ethiopia and the history of cardiology in Brazil. He is also writing on the history of human experimentation, on the use of children’s bodies for anatomic study in the early 20th study, and on ideas about heart attacks.
Howell’s publications have appeared widely in the medical and the historical literature. In addition to his medical publications, Howell is the author of “Washtenaw County Bike Rides” (University of Michigan Press).
Muzammil M. Hussain is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media, Faculty Associate at the U-M International Institute and the U-M Institute for Social Research, and Faculty Affiliate at the U-M Ford School of Public Policy’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). Dr. Hussain’s interdisciplinary research is at the intersections of global communication, social analytics, and technology governance. At Michigan, Professor Hussain teaches courses on digital politics, research methods, and global innovation. He has authored numerous research articles, book chapters, and industry reports examining global ICT politics, innovation, and policy, including pieces in The Journal of Democracy, The Journal of International Affairs, The Brookings Institutions’ Issues in Technology and Innovation, The InterMedia Institute’s Development Research Series, International Studies Review, International Journal of Middle East Affairs, The Communication Review, Policy and Internet, and Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism.
Dr. Michael Imperiale is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology in the Medical School. He also serves as Associate Vice President for Research – Research Policy and Compliance at the University of Michigan. Dr. Imperiale’s research interests focus on the study of DNA tumor viruses. He has served on several National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committees addressing the issues of responsible conduct of research, dual use life sciences research, and the intersection of science and security, and has published extensively on these topics. Most recently, he chaired a study entitled "Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology." He was as an inaugural member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity from 2005-2014, previously served on the Planetary Protection Subcommittee at NASA, and currently serves on the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law at the National Academies.
Nkem Khumbah is a lecturer and member of the STEM-Africa Initiative at the University of Michigan. He holds a Doctorate degree from George Mason University. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Michigan, Khumbah was an Assistant Professor of mathematics at North Georgia College and State University. He also held research fellowships at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and the Mathematical Science Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. His research has been on development and application of mathematical structures that facilitate the compression of massive data sets with minimal distortion to the statistical structure of the data.
An avid ambassador of international scientific capacity and human development, he was founder and chair of the Buea (Cameroon) International Conference Series on the Mathematical Sciences (2009 — 2013).
He has been consulting for and closely working with multiple regional and international organizations, including the African Union, select African governments, the World Bank African Centers of Excellence Project, UNESCO, Washington-based Constituency for Africa (CFA), the Association of African Universities, the African Network of Science and Technology Institutes (ANSTI), among others. He served in 2015 as Founding Executive Curator of the Next Einstein Forum (NEF): Africa's Global Forum for Science, Policy and Society. He served as the Science and Technology chair of the first ever African Continental Summit on Higher Education in 2015, and co-authored recommendations that were adopted by the African Union, at its establishment of a Committee of 10 African Heads of States as continental Champions of Science and Education. He currently serves on the steering Committee of the African Light Source Initiative, and as a Senior Fellow of the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils.
His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the New York Times and the African Policy Review, and he continues to present at numerous conferences and symposia as keynote speaker, panel member and speaker in North America, Africa, Asia, and South America.
Anna Kirkland J.D., Ph.D., is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science, and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010). Her new book Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury has recently been published by New York University Press in December 2016. In Vaccine Court, Kirkland explores how activists and government actors come to know, identify, and compensate for vaccine injuries, and what recent debates over vaccine safety reveal about democratic engagement with volatile scientific questions in the contemporary United States. Recent articles include also "Power and Persuasion in the Vaccine Debates: An Analysis of Political Efforts and Outcomes in the States, 1998-2012," "Critical Approaches to Wellness," "Credibility Battles in the Autism Litigation," "The Legitimacy of Vaccine Critics: What's Left after Autism?," and "The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism." Kirkland recently received a National Science Foundation grant to study the organizational handling of rights claims against sex discrimination in health care settings under the Affordable Care Act.
Trish Koman has long been an advocate for public health protection as a scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and now the University of Michigan. She conducts research develops policy on environmental health issues, with a particular emphasis on protecting at-risk populations from air pollution. While at EPA, Dr. Koman was the principal author of landmark national air pollution standards for the fine particulate matter that successfully withstood a challenge to the US Supreme Court. She established an international program to reduce diesel emissions from seaports, initiated the Clean School Bus USA partnership program to protect children’s health, and managed multi-disciplinary benefit-cost analyses, regulatory programs, and technological innovation initiatives. At the University of Michigan, Dr. Koman’s community-engaged scholarship includes climate change vulnerability mapping, wildland fire smoke exposure studies, as well as health studies related to air pollution, obesity and cardiopulmonary health. In 2020 she was recognized with the American Public Health Association Environment Section’s Distinguished Service Award. She earned a masters degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan.
Mark J. Kushner is the George Haddad Collegiate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He received the BS and BA in Nuclear Engineering and Astronomy from the University of California at Los Angeles; and the MS and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology. He served on the technical staffs of Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Spectra Technology before joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986 where he was the Founder Professor of Engineering and served in many administrative roles. Dr. Kushner was the Dean of Engineering and the James and Katherine Melsa Professor at Iowa State University before joining UM in 2008 as founding director of the Michigan Institute for Plasma Science and Engineering. Prof. Kushner's research area is low temperature plasmas, their fundamental properties and technological applications. He has served on and chaired several National Academies policy advising studies, including the recently released 2020 Decadal Report on Plasma Science, as well as several Department of Defense and Department of Energy advisory panels. Prof. Kushner is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Paula Lantz is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a professor of public policy at the Ford School. She most recently was professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. From 1994-2011, she was faculty member at the University of Michigan with a primary appointment in the School of Public Health, and affiliations with the Ford School and the Institute for Social Research. Dr. Lantz, a social demographer, studies the role of public health in health care reform, clinical preventive services (such as cancer screening and prenatal care), and social inequalities in health. She is particularly interested in the role of health care versus broad social policy aimed at social determinants of health in reducing social disparities in health status. She is currently doing research regarding the potential of social impact bonds to reduce Medicaid expenditures. Lantz received an MA in sociology from Washington University, St. Louis, and an MS in epidemiology and PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin.
Silvia M. Lindtner is associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner's research interests include cultures and politics of technology innovation and entrepreneurship as well as shifts in tech labor, industry, policy, and governance. Lindtner draws from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China's shifting role in global tech production, unpacking how enduring colonialism and racism shape the global political economy of technology production and science and technology policy. Her first book "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation” (Princeton University Press, 2020) offers a transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image, revealing how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s work contributes to the fields of science and technology studies, science and technology policy, China studies, digital studies, HCI (human computer interaction), cultural and feminist anthropology, and global communication studies. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.
Thomas P. Lyon holds the Dow Chair of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the University of Michigan, with appointments in both the Ross School of Business and the School of Environment and Sustainability. He is President of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), and Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. He earned his BSE from Princeton University, and MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University. Professor Lyon is a leader in using economic analysis to understand corporate environmental strategy, especially in the energy industry, and how it is shaped by emerging government regulations, non-governmental organizations, and consumer demands. His book Corporate Environmentalism and Public Policy, published by Cambridge University Press, was the first rigorous economic analysis of this increasingly important topic. Lyon is a Senior Editor at Organization & Environment, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and the Journal of Regulatory Economics. His current research focuses on the impacts of information disclosure, the role of private governance mechanisms (especially ecolabeling) in solving environmental problems, the factors motivating regulatory compliance, and the role of corporations in shaping government policy.
Professor Lyon has been a Visiting Professor at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy (Fulbright Grant), the University of Chicago (Olin Foundation Fellowship), Resources for the Future (Gilbert White Fellowship), Stanford University, the University of Paris, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the University of Basel, the University of Bonn, UCLA, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the InterAmerican Development Bank, the Alcoa Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency. He has served as an expert witness for a variety of organizations, including the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, the Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control, AT&T, and Cogentrix. He has also consulted for a wide range of organizations, including US Foods, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), KPMG, Consumers Power, Huron Consulting Group, Industrial Economics, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy.
Sarah Mills is a senior project manager and lecturer, splitting her time between the Graham Sustainability Institute and the Ford School. Within Graham, she leads the Graham Energy Futures Initiative and a grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to help communities across the state consider clean energy in their land use planning, zoning, and other policymaking. At the Ford School, she teaches and conducts research at the intersection of energy policy and land use planning--especially in rural communities. Her research has included how renewable energy development impacts rural communities (positively and negatively) in Michigan, the disparate reactions of rural landowners to wind and solar projects, and how state and local policies facilitate or hinder renewable energy deployment. She has a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, a master's in engineering for sustainable development from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Villanova University.
Anne Petersen has been involved with STPP in a variety of roles over the past three decades. She currently chairs the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Division of Policy and Global Affairs, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine Global Health Board, and is a faculty affiliate of UM's Africa Studies Center STEM Africa initiative working to develop Africa using science, technology, and innovation (STI). She also leads the secretariat for the International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies, is a Director of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Founder/President of the Global Philanthropy Alliance, among other committees and boards. She was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the US Senate as Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation in the 1990's. She is a Research professor at UM in the Center for Human Growth and Development. Her degrees are all from the University of Chicago, in mathematics and statistics.
Nicholson Price is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He holds a PhD in Biology and a JD, both from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard. He teaches patents and health law, and studies innovation in the life sciences, with a recent focus on big data and machine learning in medicine. He recommends reading Bujold, Butcher, and Brust. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, the Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and elsewhere. Nicholson is a cofounder of Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences.
Barry Rabe is a Professor of Public Policy in the Ford School and also holds appointments in the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Program in the Environment. He is a non-resident senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Much of his recent research examines state and regional development of policies to reduce greenhouse gases, which has been conducted in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. In 2006, Rabe became the first social scientist to receive a Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in recognition of his contribution to both scholarship and policy making. His 2004 Brookings book, Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Evolving Politics of American Climate Change Policy, received the 2005 Lynton Keith Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association in recognition of the best book published on environmental politics and policy in the past three years.
Rabe has also written extensively about such topics as nuclear and hazardous waste management, cross-border and cross-media transfer of pollutants in federal regulatory systems, and the conditions necessary to achieve intergovernmental cooperation in the implementation of federal grant and regulatory programs. During the 2008-09 year, he was a visiting professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he organized the National Conference on Climate Governance and edited a series of subsequent publications. In 2004, he completed a ten-year term as editor of the American Governance and Public Policy book series for Georgetown University Press. At Michigan, he previously served as Director of the Program in the Environment and as Interim Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment. In 2007, he received the Daniel Elazar Award for Career Contribution to the Study of Federalism from the American Political Science Association. In 2009, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Daniel Raimi is a Senior Research Associate at Resources for the Future and a lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He works on a range of energy policy issues with a focus on oil and gas regulation and taxation and climate change policy. He has published in academic journals including Science, Science Advances, Environmental Science and Technology, Energy Policy, and Journal of Economic Perspectives, popular outlets including The New Republic, Newsweek, Slate, and Fortune, and presented his research for policymakers, industry and other stakeholders around the United States and internationally. The Fracking Debate, his first book, combines stories from his travels to dozens of oil and gas producing regions with a detailed examination of key policy issues, and is published by Columbia University Press as part of the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy book series (www.thefrackingdebate.com).
Current research examines the future of energy development in the United States, with a focus on how producing communities are managing near-term impacts while planning for the future. He also hosts Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future, in which he interviews leading researchers on energy and environmental topics.
He received his master’s degree in public policy from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and his bachelor’s degree in music from Wesleyan University. Prior to entering graduate school at Duke, Raimi worked as a guitarist, composer, and music instructor in New York and Los Angeles. In his spare time, he still plays music (mostly jazz and bluegrass), cooks, plays tennis, and spends time with family. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife and son.
Kaitlin Raimi is an Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She studies how social motivations promote or prevent sustainable behaviors, especially those related to climate change. She particularly interested in how people compare their own beliefs and behaviors to those of other people, how the desire to make a good impression can influence people to mitigate climate change, and how one adopting one sustainable behavior affects subsequent environmental decisions. Raimi also has ongoing work on how different ways of framing climate change affect people's attitudes to climate policy, including whether learning about new technologies to combat climate change might affect support for regulatory mitigation policies. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment and Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt University. She received a BA in psychology from Tufts University, and an MA and PhD in Social Psychology from Duke University.
Tony G. Reames is an assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, Director of the Urban Energy Justice Lab, and a JPB Environmental Health Fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has a PhD in public administration from The University of Kansas, a Masters in engineering management from Kansas State University, and a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University. Dr. Reames conducts research in the emerging field of energy justice, which investigates fair and equitable access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy technology. His research employs energy analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), and policy analysis tools to investigate disparities in residential energy dynamics focusing on the production and persistence of spatial, racial, and socioeconomic inequality.
Joy Rohde is an associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She is also a faculty member in the Science, Technology, and Society Program and the Department of History. Her work examines the relationship between the social and behavioral sciences and the American state from the late 19th century to the present. Her first book, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), investigates the Cold War origins and contemporary consequences of Pentagon social research contracting for national security. She is currently working on a book project that explores how ideas about cybernetics and advances in computing impacted the social sciences, policy analysis, and national security in the United States since the 1960s. Prior to joining the Ford School, Rohde was an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, and she has held fellowships from the Miller Center of Public Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Christian Sandvig is the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media with faculty appointments in the School of Information and Communication Studies. He is a social researcher studying the public policy implications of algorithmic systems that curate and organize culture using information technology. Sandvig was previously a computer programmer with government, start-up, and Fortune 500 experience; he taught at the University of Illinois and Oxford University and has worked as an academic visitor at MIT, Harvard, Intel, and Microsoft Research. He holds the Ph.D and M.A. from Stanford University and the B.A. from the University of California, Davis. Sandvig was previously named a "next-generation leader in science and technology policy" by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the NSF CAREER award in human-centered computing. His group blog was named one of the "Must-Follow Feeds" in science, culture, and design by Wired.
Perrin Selcer works at the intersections of environmental history, history of the human sciences, science and technology studies, and international relations. His first major research project showed how experts affiliated with UN agencies made the global human environment a central concern of the international community. His current research explores how knowledge and narratives about the origins of the Holocene informs contemporary anxieties about and responses to global environmental crisis. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.
Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School and the Chief of the Research Ethics Service in the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, is a lawyer/bioethicist who focuses on the secondary research use of health data and biospecimens. Prof. Spector received her J.D. and M.Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and School of Medicine respectively after graduating from Middlebury College. She completed a research fellowship in bioethics at Michigan Medicine. She is also a former practicing drug and device attorney and was Associate Director of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues under President Obama (2010-2015).
Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D. is Professor of American Culture and History, with appointments in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women&rquo;s Studies at the University of Michigan. She also is a core faculty member in the Latina/o Studies Program and the Science, Technology, and Society Program. Her research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America which was published in second edition by University of California Press in 2015. Her latest book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) was a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which studies qualitative and quantitative patterns of eugenic sterilization in twentieth-century California; this research is informing policy efforts to provide redress to survivors of compulsory sterilization. Stern has held numerous grants for her work in medical history and health policy, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He is the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorest communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. His work has been mentioned by the New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
James Wells is Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. He has also been staff member or resident scholar at three international physics laboratories (CERN in Switzerland/France, DESY in Germany and SLAC in California). He has served on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) that guides high-energy physics research for the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. In these capacities he has lead or co-lead numerous studies for decision making bodies on large-scale (multi-billion dollar) research infrastructure projects both in the United States and abroad. He was also selected by the American Physical Society to serve as a member and subsequently chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA), which oversees the creation, adoption and advocacy for policy positions taken in Washington by the Society. His activities and research interests in policy have been at the intersection of "big science" and national security, focusing on the various scientific and sociological factors that impact decision making and policy for large-scale science projects and initiatives, including those that impact national security through sensitive international engagement, stable scientific infrastructure concerns, and large-scale defense(-related) programs and initiatives.
Kyle Whyte is Professor of Environment and Sustainability and George Willis Pack Professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, serving as a faculty member of the environmental justice specialization. Previously, Kyle was Professor and Timnick Chair in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. Kyle’s research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kyle has partnered with numerous Tribes, First Nations and inter-Indigenous organizations in the Great Lakes region and beyond on climate change planning, education and policy. He is involved in a number of projects and organizations that advance Indigenous research methodologies, including the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation, Tribal Climate Camp, and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga. He has served as an author on reports by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and is a former member of the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science and the Michigan Environmental Justice Work Group. Kyle's work has received the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice and MSU's Distinguished Partnership and Engaged Scholarship awards, and grants from the National Science Foundation.
Post-doctoral Fellows
Beza Merid is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, affiliated with the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program. His research examines how patients, caregivers, health institutions, and policy makers shape what it means to be a "responsible" patient in public and health policy discourses. He is in the process of writing a series of five journal articles that explore the relationship between health activism, the Affordable Care Act, and the ongoing effort to retrench coverage benefits provided under this law. The first article in this series, published in March 2019 and titled “Fight For Our Health: Activism in the Face of Health Insurance Precarity,” can be found in BioSocieties. He is on the tenure-track job market during the 2019-2020AY. Merid received his Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, his M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA, and his B.A. in Comparative Literature from USC.