People

Abigail Ward is a PhD student in the Palkovacs lab with research focusing on thiamine deficiency in steelhead in California. Her work aims to understand how ocean diet contributes to this deficiency, the adaptive capacity of steelhead to low thiamine levels, and the potential for natural selection towards a resident life history. By exploring these areas, she hopes to uncover critical insights into the ecological and evolutionary dynamics affecting steelhead populations, ultimately informing conservation strategies for this important species.

Ali Mohammad Rezaie holds a PhD in Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure engineering from George Mason University, USA. He has a Bachelor’s in Water Resources Engineering and a Master’s in Water Resources Development from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. He has worked and taught on coastal hazards, climate change adaptation, and natural solutions in multiple US, UK, and Bangladesh research and academic institutions. His current research involves estimating the global climate risks and benefits of mangroves and coral reefs.

Ando Rabearisoa is a Ph.D. student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with a Designated Emphasis on Coastal Science and Policy at UCSC, with a focus on the involvement of local communities in the design and implementation of marine conservation efforts through systems of locally managed marine areas. Ando commits to finding integrated solutions to achieve social development promoting natural resources management and conservation. Ando joined the CCCR team in April 2024 as a science communication Fellow, working with the Black in Marine Science Network and The Learning Center at UCSC to develop communication materials to promote integrative nature-based solutions and the importance of diversity in coastal climate resilience.

Anna FitzGerald Guth is a student in the Science Communication Master’s program at UC Santa Cruz. She has a bachelor’s in English and Environmental Studies from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Anna has a fall 2024 internship with the Monterey Herald. As a Center and Ocean Science Trust fellow, she is focused on communicating issues of coastal climate resilience in a way that the non-scientist public can understand.

Brook Thompson is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Studies. Thompson has civil and environmental engineering degrees with a focus on water resources. Miss Thompson is from the Yurok and Karuk tribes of California. Her CCCR project is focused on “Restoring Chinook Salmon on The Klamath River to Rebuild Resilient Tribal Fisheries and Increase Food Security for Tribal Members,” which focuses on differences in nutrient content and DNA of the spring compared to the fall chinook salmon on the Klamath River. The project includes interviews with Yurok tribal members on how spring salmon runs have changed.

Carly Kay is a student in the Science Communication Master’s program at UC Santa Cruz. She has a bachelor’s in Communication with a minor in Science Communication from UC Santa Barbara. Carly has a fall 2024 internship with Lookout Santa Cruz. As a CCCR fellow, she is focused on communicating issues of coastal climate resilience in a way that the non-scientist public can understand.

Carolina da Silveira Bueno is an economist. She holds a Master’s and PhD in Economics from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, where her research focuses on sustainable transition with economic development, environmental justice, and nature protection. At UCSC’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, in the Payton Lab, she will conduct surveys to assess the policy landscape for reconstructing wetlands as a nature-based solution to combat climate change. Additionally, she will be working on the valuation of ecosystem services provided by coastal wetlands, with a focus on understanding the social and economic benefits. Her goal is to ensure that wetland restoration projects are designed with environmental justice in mind, helping to guide policy and practice towards equitable and sustainable solutions.

Carter Ingram has over 15 years of experience at the forefront of integrating nature into sustainable development across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States. Prior to joining Pollination, Carter was a Senior Manager in EY’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services practice where she advised food/agriculture, real estate, infrastructure and tourism businesses in designing and implementing ESG goals and strategies, programs and impact measurement, with a focus on natural capital. Carter completed a Post-doctoral fellowship at the Earth Institute of Columbia University and has a M.Sc. and D.Phil. from the School of Geography and the Environment of Oxford University. 

Cynthia Ellis Topsey is Ambassador-at-Large for the Garifuna Nation in Belize and founder of The Godsman Celestino Ellis Center for Garifuna Culture (GCE-CFGC). As a community advocate, her lifelong mission centers around advocating for Garifuna sovereignty and land rights, both locally and globally. As the Ambassador at Large and Chief Executive Officer of The Indigenous Peoples Network, she tirelessly champions equality, especially in the realms of sustainability and environmental justice. Her research interests encompass a range of issues, from native agroecology practices to coastal adaptation. Cynthia Ellis Topsey served as a visiting research fellow at the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience in the spring of 2024.

Erica’s research focuses on the interactions that exist between ocean global-change processes, marine organisms, and fishery systems. Erica is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow studying the effects of ocean warming, deoxygenation, and harmful algal blooms on California Dungeness crab as part of the Kroeker Lab, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Prior to beginning her postdoc at UCSC, Erica completed her Ph.D. in Marine Biology, with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the Aburto Lab. Long-term, Erica hopes to use her science to help generate ‘conservation solutions’ to coastal and open-ocean issues in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Gillian Bogart has a PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Studies. She is also a founding member of the University’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions. As a CCCR Fellow, she is looking at how wetland restoration efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area seek to balance positive outcomes with risks involved in restoration processes. She is particularly interested in understanding this in relation to people’s recreational and coastal resource gathering practices in the baylands. This project extends from Gillian’s years of research with coastal fisher-forager communities in Indonesia and her broader interest in more-than-human health.

Gonzalo Galetto is an Argentine-American artist and filmmaker currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work and research explore contemporary artistic practices that are responsive to the current climatic conditions and which propose a poetics of attention that are situated in place. As a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab, he is researching how the expanding field of environmental artistic practices is engaging with more-than-human and elemental discourses and how contemporary artistic practices can ask ethical and political questions in response to the changing climate from a situated perspective and in relation to land.

Guillermo Franco leads Guy Carpenter’s parametric advisory offerings and supports GC Securities in the design and analysis of parametric cat bonds. He also coordinates research initiatives in the fields of catastrophe risk, parametric risk transfer and nature. Since 2012, Guillermo has supported GC’s operations from Boston, London, Dublin, and New York, leading GC’s research strategy and fostering a better understanding of catastrophe risk models through Guy Carpenter’s Model Suitability Analysis (MSA)® initiative. He is a frequent research collaborator at UC Santa Cruz and the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Hannah Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. She centers process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction as an ethical and political practice—circling around questions of landscape, listening, memory, and time. Her PhD research in Film & Digital Media at UCSC focuses on interdisciplinary practices of place, how time is expressed and constructed through narratives with a focus on speculative practices, and documentary studies with an emphasis on poetic and collective praxis. She is currently working on Topography, an expanded documentary project that explores the hidden histories embedded in public lands through live-edited performances, installations, community projects, and documentary films. More at www.hannahjayanti.com. 

As an interdisciplinary scientist, Heather Tallis works to bridge nature, the economy, and people’s lives. Dr. Tallis served as President Biden’s policy advisor on nature in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she drove cross-agency action on nature-based solutions, advanced efforts to account for nature in benefit-cost analysis, and with the US Global Change Research Program, created the National Nature Assessment. Through previous work with The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Capital Project, she has used the tools of science, human-centered design, and innovation to infuse nature into decisions with local communities, governments, and the private sector around the globe. She is currently a Senior Fellow with the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds several other roles as an independent advisor, including with the World Wildlife Fund and private engineering and technology companies.

Publications:

Mainstreaming nature in US federal policy
Heather Tallis , Eli P. Fenichel, Laura Petes, Solomon Hsiang, Phillip S. Levin, Hila Levy, and Jane Lubchenco
Science, 1 Aug 2024, Vol 385, Issue 6708, pp. 498-501

Linda Hirsch is a postdoctoral researcher at Computational Media, UCSC, under the supervision of Katherine Isbister. She holds a magna cum laude doctoral degree in Media Informatics from LMU Munich, Germany. Her research focuses on exploring, conceptualizing, and creating meaningful human-environment interaction to strengthen communities toward increased climate resilience. Linda Hirsch has been an elected executive committee member of the German group “Be-greifbare Interaktion” since 2021, an expert research group within the German Society of Information Technology regarding topics for tangible and embedded interfaces. 

Mark DeGraff is a student in the Science Communication Master’s program at UC Santa Cruz. He has a bachelor’s in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin where he wrote an undergraduate thesis on the impact of warming temperatures on soil accretion rates in a coastal salt marsh. Mark has worked as a guide and park ranger throughout the western U.S., most recently in Yellowstone National Park. As a CCCR fellow, he is focused on communicating issues of coastal climate resilience in a way that the non-scientist public can understand.

Mark Morales’s research interests lie at the intersection of basic and applied marine ecosystem studies. Using state-of-the-art quantitative methods, his work attempts to disentangle the influence of physical oceanographic forcing on marine ecosystems dynamics with a particular focus on coastal pelagic ecosystems. For his CCCR Postdoctoral Fellow project, Mark is applying hierarchical Bayesian state-space models to forecast the spatial distribution and abundance of Dungeness crab along the U.S. West Coast. In collaboration with a larger CCCR team, the spatial overlap of harmful algal blooms and Dungeness crab will be assessed to better inform climate-ready fisheries decisions in California.

Paige Gardner is a second year PhD student in the Palkovacs lab. Her research seeks to understand the potential for rapid evolution of salmon to stream warming caused by climate change. Using a combination of physiological and genomic data, she aims to identify the specific gene regions and alleles underlying thermal tolerance in salmon populations across the West Coast. She hopes to use this knowledge to inform management strategies to accelerate adaptation and conserve salmon populations.

Rae Taylor-Burns recently completed her PhD in Ocean Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, with a focus in Coastal Science and Policy. Her research has focused on exploring how marsh habitat restoration can reduce flood risk in urban estuaries like San Francisco Bay. She has also worked with local governments on California’s central coast to develop climate vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans. In her role as a CCCR Fellow, she is exploring the policy and finance applications of nature-based climate solutions.

Sam Ginther is a CCCR Postdoctoral Fellow working to understand the relative effects of climate warming and harvest mortality on age and size structure of fishery populations. His research will also help generate strategies for resource managers to build more climate resilient fisheries in California. Sam completed his PhD at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where he studied the energetic cost of reproduction and its consequences for animal life-histories.

Sarah Bird is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher whose work focuses on arboreal-human relationships including attunement to place, the role of awe and affect, and multiple temporal and physical scales for an entangled, restorative future at a time of ecological crisis. Bird is a Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in Film and Digital Media, where she is a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab. Her scholarship focuses on plant thinking, and her visual work uses film, projections, photographs, drawings and animation to consider an ethical relationality in the more than human world. www.sarahbirdstudio.com

Sidney Madsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Justice and Community Engagement, a position created in partnership with the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County (CAB) and the Center for Reimagining Leadership. In this role, she will co-design research with CAB that informs the theory and practice of addressing climate resilience and climate justice for farmworkers and their communities. This project builds on her background using participatory methods to study the social and environmental sustainability of food systems. Her previous research has explored how grassroots agroecology interventions impact working conditions, food security, and incomes in agricultural communities of Mexico, Guatemala, and Malawi.