Greg Biging
Professor of Biometrics and Remote Sensing
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
University of California, Berkeley

Greg Biging is Professor of Biometrics and Remote Sensing in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. He holds a B.S. in mathematics and PhD in biometrics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He served as founding director for the first remote sensing and GIS center at Berkeley dedicated to Earth Remote Sensing (Center for Assessment and Monitoring of Forest and Environmental Resources (CAMFER). He teaches courses in environmental sampling, spatial data analysis and remote sensing. Dr. Biging’s research is primarily focused on the statistical analysis of LiDAR, digital photography and satellite imagery useful in 2D and 3D analysis of forests. He uses these technologies to improve our ability to measure and monitor important forest and ecological resources throughout California.

Konstantine Georgakakos
Managing Director
Hydrologic Research Center
San Diego, California

Dr. Georgakakos holds M.S. and Sc.D. Degrees in Hydrology and Water Resources, Civil Engineering, from MIT (1980, 1982).  He is a Founding Director and Senior Research Scientist of the Hydrologic Research Center at San Diego, California, a public-benefit nonprofit research, technology transfer and training Corporation. He holds titles of Adjunct Professor VII at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Iowa.  He has been a Research Hydrologist at the Office of Hydrology of the U.S. National Weather Service (1982-1985) working on problems of flood and flash flood prediction under uncertainty.  Dr. Georgakakos has been appointed US Expert in Hydrologic Modeling to the WMO Commission for Hydrology Working Group on Applications (1997-Present).  He has received the US National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1987-1992), The University of Iowa University Faculty Scholar Award (1988-1991), the National Research Council - NOAA Associateship Award (1982-1985), and the John W. Olver Leadership Award from the University of Massachusetts Water Resources Research Center (2009). He has served as the chair and member of the AMS Hydrology and AGU Precipitation Committees, and Associate Editor for Advances in Water Resources, and ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. He is a Chief Editor of the Journal of Hydrology.  He was elected Fellow of the AMS (2005).  He participated in various National Research Council Committees pertaining to hydrometeorological issues. His research is in surface hydrology, hydrometeorology, hydroclimatology and water resources. Dr. Georgakakos has authored or co-authored more than 100 refereed journal publications, 16 contributions to books, and more than 160 conference proceedings and technical reports.  He has led several technology transfer activities that resulted in operational demonstrations and systems, including: Rainfall and flow prediction system for Panama Canal Authority; Multi-spectral satellite rainfall estimation system for Nile River basin; Flash-flood guidance system for Central America; and the Integrated Climate-Hydrology-Decision system INFORM for N. California; and the Global Flash Flood Guidance System (in cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization, the US National Weather Service and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance of the U.S. Agency for International Development) that currently (2011) serves more than half a billion people worldwide.

Alexander (Sasha) Gershunov
Associate Research Meteorologist
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego

Gershunov's research focuses on interrelated aspects of weather, climate and society. His research interests include understanding the links between regional weather extremes and large-scale climate variability and change, long-range climate prediction, paleo-climate reconstruction, the atmospheric water cycle, water resources, heat waves, cold snaps, climate and wildfire, energy, health and agriculture, climate influence on society and human influence on climate.

Sasha received formal education at the University of California (UC). He holds a BS in mathematics from UC Irvine (1986), MS in applied probability and statistics (1989) and PhD in geography (1996), both at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). Sasha taught courses in Climate Change and Tropical Meteorology at UCSB before he joined Scripps and UCSD. His research interests are global, but focus progressively on North America, the Southwest and California. His recent work includes evaluating trends in heat wave activity in California and Nevada as well as assessing impacts these trends have on public health and agriculture.
   
Sasha has received the NASA Global Change Research Fellowship, five Korein Foundation Research Awards, and a Rotary Foundation International Teaching
Grant. He has served extended terms as visiting researcher at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) of the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), and at the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM), Meteo-France, the French meteorological service. Sasha has also served as a visiting professor at the Departamento de Fisica, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He enjoys teaching and has strong international research collaborations in France, Spain, Mexico and Russia. He enjoys working across borders and disciplines.

Gary B. Griggs
Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences 
Director-Institute of Marine Sciences 
University of California, Santa Cruz 
 
Dr. Griggs received his B.A. in Geology in 1965 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Oregon State University in 1968. He has been a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968 and has served as Chairman of the Department of Earth Sciences, Associate Dean of Natural Sciences, and has been the Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory since 1991. He has served as Chair of the University of California Marine Council from 1999 to 2009. 

Dr. Griggs was a Fulbright Scholar in Greece from 1974-75. In 1998 he was awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award in the Division of Physical and Biological Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.  In 2003 he was awarded the CSBPA Joe Johnson Coastal Research Award. The UCSC Alumni Association honored him with a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006, and in 2007 he was honored with being asked to give the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Ed Ricketts Memorial Lecture for lifetime achievement in marine research and education. In 2008 he was appointed to the first Science Advisory Team of the California Ocean Protection Council, and chaired the Team from 2010 to 2011. The California Coastal Commission and Sunset Magazine named him a Coastal Hero in 2009.

His research and teaching have focused on the coast of California, and include coastal processes, hazards, and coastal engineering. Dr. Griggs has written over 155 articles for professional journals. as well as authored or co-authored several books: The Earth and Land Use Planning; Geologic Hazards, Resources and Environmental Planning; Living with the California Coast; California’s Coastal Hazards: A Critical Assessment of Existing Land Use Policies and Practices; Coastal Protection Structures and Their Effectiveness; Living with the Changing California Coast; The Santa Cruz Coast: Then and Now; and Introduction to California’s Coast and Beaches.

Michael Hanemann
Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics
Department of Agricultural and Resources Economics
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Hanemann is a Chancellor's professor and Professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural and Resources Economics, where he has been on the faculty since 1968. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he earned a B.A. from Oxford University in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, a M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Dr. Hanemann's research in economics has focused largely on aspects of modeling individual choice behavior, with applications to demand forecasting, inducing conservation, environmental regulation and economic valuation. He is a leading authority on the methodology of non-market valuation using techniques of both revealed and stated preference.

Louise Jackson
Professor
Dept. of Land, Air and Water Resources
University of California, Davis

Louise Jackson is an agroecologist working on biodiversity and nutrient cycling from the gene to landscape levels. She is Professor and Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California Davis, where she holds the Orr Chair in the Environmental Plant Sciences. As part of California’s climate change scenarios analysis project, she leads an interdisciplinary group studying how ecosystem services will be affected by climate change in agricultural landscapes. She is also co-Chair of the DIVERSITAS Agrobiodiversity Network, which is focusing on how biodiversity-based agriculture can support food security, help conserve wild biodiversity, and increase the set of multiple ecosystem services across an agricultural landscape. She maintains research and science-policy roles, and is a participant in programs on agricultural futures from the local to the international scale.

Susi Moser
Director and Principal Researcher
Susanne Moser Research & Consulting
Stanford University

Susanne Moser is Director and Principal Researcher of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting in Santa Cruz, CA. She also serves as a Social Science Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Center for Ocean Solutions, and as a Research Associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on adaptation to climate change, resilience, decision support, and effective climate change communication in support of social change. Previously she served as a Research Scientist at the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. She has worked for the Heinz Center in Washington, DC on a congressionally mandated project on coastal erosion and management, and for the Union of Concerned Scientists as their staff scientist for climate change. Dr. Moser is a geographer by training (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University), whose research foci 1995 have been the human dimensions of global change (i.e. causes, vulnerabilities, impacts, adaptive responses, and uncertainties within them), and how they play out in coastal areas, human health, forest-reliant rural as well as urban areas, and in the water sector.

Dr. Moser is co-editor with Lisa Dilling (University of Colorado-Boulder) on a major anthology on climate change communication, called Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Moser contributed to Working Group II of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, is a Review Editor for the IPCC’s Special Report on "Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation" (SREX), and again a contributing lead author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment (coastal chapter, WG2). Her work has been recognized through fellowships in the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, the UCAR Leadership Academy, Kavli Frontiers of Science Program, the Donella Meadows Leadership Program, and the Google Science Communication Program.

Bart Ostro
Chief
Air Pollution Epidemiology Section
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA)
California Environmental Protection Agency

Bart Ostro is currently the Chief of the Air Pollution Epidemiology Section, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), California Environmental Protection Agency.  His primary responsibilities include formulating the Agency's recommendations for state ambient air quality standards and investigating the potential health effects of air pollution and climate change.   His previous research on mortality and morbidity effects of air pollution has contributed to the setting of federal and state air pollution standards for ozone and particulate matter.  Dr. Ostro was also a co-author of the U.S. EPA regulatory impact analysis that was a basis for the federal ban of lead in gasoline.  He served on U.S. EPA’s Science Advisory Board Clean Air Council and on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Estimating the Benefits of Proposed Air Pollution Regulations.  Dr. Ostro is an Associate Editor of Environmental Health Perspectives and has published over 100 scientific papers.  He has consulted for several federal and international institutions including the World Health Organization and the World Bank, and with several foreign governments including Mexico, Chile, Italy, the European Union, Thailand, Indonesia, India and China.  He has been honored with Special Achievement Awards from the U.S. EPA and the California Air Resources Board, and has received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.  In 2005 he was given the American Lung Association of California’s Clean Air Award, presented to the individual who “has made the most significant contribution to the cause of cleaner air in California.”

John Radke
Associate Professor
College of Environmental Design
University of California, Berkeley

Professor Radke’s research interests are in the design and development of analytical methods embedded in geographic information science (GIS). His interests include the development of metrics that assist scientists and professionals in recognizing spatial structure and change in complex landscapes. These metrics advance our ability to classify and make sense of data generated by sophisticated sensors that record and map spatial distributions of phenomena beyond human comprehension. Processing and characterizing the morphology of landscapes in these data rich environments aids regional and environmental planners in their quest to construct and apply spatial interaction models to real world problems, such as: assessing potential fire risk in the wild-land urban interface; assessing environmental risk in highly erodible terrains; measuring and predicting landscape hazards; and our ability to respond and mitigate human disasters.

Marty Ralph
Chief, Water Cycle Branch
Physical Sciences Division
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Dr. F. Martin Ralph is a research meteorologist who has studied mesoscale and synoptic scale weather phenomena and how they are affected by climate variability. A key area of interest is exploring how to best observe the atmosphere, with an emphasis on advancing the physical understanding of extreme precipitation processes as well as related hydrometeorological predictions and climate projections. He is currently Chief of the Water Cycle Branch at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory/Physical Sciences Division, and a Research Associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Dr. Ralph has published over 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 23 as the lead author. He has helped lead the establishment of testbeds as a method to accelerate the development and infusion of new science and technology into weather and climate forecasting operations. He has developed new projects, experiments and teams on several subjects, most having to do with observations, physical understanding, and precipitation.

Terry Root
Senior Fellow
Woods Institute for the Environment
Stanford University

Terry L. Root is a Senior Fellow/University Faculty at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and a fellow at the California Academy of Sciences. Her research strives to answer such questions as: What changes have occurred in wild animals and plants in the past century with ~0.8oC of warming around the globe?  What might the future ecological consequences be for wild species as the globe continues to warm rapidly? Root was awarded the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in1990, and in 1992 she was selected as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment. She was selected as an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 1999, and, among other honors, was co-awardee with Stephen H. Schneider of the Conservation Achievement Award from National Wildlife Federation in 2002. Root was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change that in 2007 was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.

Root earned her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of New Mexico, her master’s degree in Biology from the University of Colorado and her doctorate in Biology from Princeton University. 

Tony Westerling
Associate Professor
School of Engineering
University of California, Merced

Dr. Anthony Westerling is an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering and Geography at UC Merced.  Prior to coming to UC Merced in 2006, he spent six years in the Climate Research Division of Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a Post-graduate Researcher and an Assistant Project Scientist. His research interests include applied climatology and seasonal forecasting for wildfire management; climate change impacts on wildfire and related aspects of mountain hydrology; wildfire related emissions and carbon fluxes; residential property losses; and paleo reconstructions of climate-wildfire interactions.  Dr. Westerling holds a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.  He has published extensively on wildfire and climate in the western United States.