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Let’s inspire our communities and educate them on the diverse environmental issues leaders in environmental engineering/science are doing! WIESE is a space for Women+ In STEM to share the issues they face in the industry, the solutions they make, the roadblocks they push through, and what they learning to teach society to keep the environment clean! Enjoy!
Copyright: © Saranya Anantapantula
Dr. Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi is an ecohydrologist interested in understanding water-carbon relations within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. She uses an array of methods, from satellite data to process-based modeling, from stable isotopes lab experiments to field measurements. Dr. Gerlein-Safdi graduated with her PhD from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University in 2017 and was a junior fellow from the Michigan Society of Fellows from 2017 to 2020, working in the department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. She started as a Project Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in October 2020 and is part of the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division, splitting her time between the Watershed Function SFA and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science SFA team. In this new setting, she is continuing her work linking the water and carbon cycles in vegetation, understanding the effects of dew, fog, and rain interception on plant function and water resources, and combining stable isotopes, remote sensing, and process-based modeling to get an understanding of how these processes hold across spatial and temporal scales.
Bethany Laursen, Ph.D., M.A., M.S., is an integration and implementation studies (I2S) specialist with Laursen Evaluation & Design, LLC, where she empowers knowledge professionals to make sense of sustainability issues by using the right tool at the right time. Her research reveals how these tools work as aids to cross-disciplinary communication, cognition, and collaboration. Bethany’s strong understanding of cross-disciplinary process is rooted in her own formal training in seven disciplines, two inter-disciplines, and one trans-discipline; five years as a K12 educator; and seven years as an environmental evaluator. Bethany is a member of the award-winning Toolbox Dialogue Initiative. She is also a research and evaluation partner with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and a founding member of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research and Education (ITD Alliance) Working Group on Toolkits and Methods. Bethany is currently the Assistant Dean at Michigan State University's Graduate School, and she loves cats and canoes.
Maitreyi Koduganti works as a researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, India. Koduganti is also a part of the Advisory Board of the Water Youth Network. Koduganti has earned a second Master’s degree in Water Management and Governance from UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, the Netherlands. Much of her work in the last four years focused on climate sciences, vulnerability studies, resource management, gender studies, sustainability and Research-into-Use. Koduganti's inclination towards action-oriented research have resulted in developing documentaries and participatory games. Hailing from India that faces climatic risks at multiple scales, she believes and engage in working at the ground level along with local communities to bring about small, yet meaningful changes.
The majority of Dr. Gabrielle Boisrame’s research focuses on the interactions between wildfire, land cover, and water in mountain regions of the Western USA. Since 2013 she has been using a combination of fieldwork, remote sensing, and hydrological modeling to explore how managing natural wildfires in landscapes can improve water resources and forest health.
Clarice D. Aiello is a Brazilian quantum engineer, leader of UCLA’s Quantum Biology Tech Lab (QuBiT) and interested in how quantum physics informs biology at the nanoscale. She holds a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the École Polytechnique (France), a Physics MPhil from the University of Cambridge (UK) and a PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering. Prior to joining UCLA, Clarice held postdoctoral appointments in Bioengineering at Stanford and in Chemistry at Berkeley. Throughout her career, she received fellowships and/or awards from institutions such as the Moore Foundation, the Schlumberger Foundation, Fullbright, UNESCO and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was also recognized by MIT’s School of Engineering’s Award for Extraordinary Teaching and Mentoring. Clarice is actively engaged in fostering the quantum biology field as organizer of an international series of trainee-focused weekly talks about Quantum Biology and also as chair/keynote speaker in venues such as the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Grantees Conference (2019); The Australian and New Zealand Conferences on Optics and Photonics (ANZCOP/SPIE) (2019); The IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (2019); MindshareLA (2020); HRL Laboratories (2020) and the 2020 APS March Meeting.
Dr. Kathy Licht's research focuses on understanding the history of the Antarctic ice sheet so her research group can better determine what causes it to advance and retreat and how that fits in with the global climate system. Licht holds several active grants through the National Science Foundation that have provided opportunities for their research group to collect field data, which provides important new data to help determine Antarctica's history. One project builds on previous work in the Ross Sea (Licht et al., 2014) and includes a provenance analysis of glacial sediments in the Weddell Sea region of Antarctica. A second grant provided funding to collect radar data that lets us see beneath the ice surface and characterize the internal structure of the ice. The glacial deposits at this research site are unusual because they contain a relatively continuous sequence of glacial deposits spanning more than one glacial-interglacial cycle, helping to document ice sheet changes on these long-time scales.
Dr. Antonella Panebianco is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina. Panebianco completed her Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2019. Panebianco is interested in studying the modulation of physiological and behavioral aspects in wildlife in the context of environmental change. For her Ph.D., Panebianco worked with guanacos, the largest South-American camelid, studying the factors influencing aggression during the reproductive season and its relationship with reproduction. Currently, Panebianco's post-doctoral research is oriented toward assessing the potential impact of using drones as novel tools for monitoring wildlife for ecological, recreational, or productive interest. The results of these projects have been published in scientific journals and conferences and include topics of physiology, behavior, ecology, conservation, and sustainable use. Besides her academic interests, Panebianco works in an NGO called "Conservación Patagónica" which manages a Natural Urban Reserve in Argentinean Patagonia. Reserva Natural Urbana Cotesma aims to bring nature closer to the community through recreational activities such as bird watching and photography, among others. In addition, they coordinate an environmental education program for students of all levels, in which children are encouraged to discover what it is that connects them with nature and, based on this positive link, to understand the importance of natural environments and their conservation.
Dr. Rachel Shaffer graduated from Yale University with a BA in Environmental Studies (with a concentration in Environmental Health). After college, Shaffer worked in the Health Program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in Washington, DC. Shaffer contributed to projects related to the reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), risk assessment, systemic review, conflict of interest in chemical review panels, emerging methods in toxicity testing, and Latino health community engagement.
Shaffer has an MPH in Environmental and Occupational Health and a PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the UW Seattle School of Public Health. Shaffer's MPH thesis evaluated the association between phthalates and gestational diabetes. Shaffer's Ph.D. dissertation research focused on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and dementia.
Diana Vieira is an Environmental Engineer with a special focus on soil erosion risk. She dedicated most of her time to monitoring burned areas and understanding the underlying key processes in fire-affected soils and landscapes to better adapt models to burned conditions. During her research path, she was the Principal investigator of the FEMME project and supervised Ph.D. theses, postdoctoral and MSc fellowships, participated in national and EU projects, and organized international scientific events. Currently, in the European Soil Observatory, she is dedicated to large-scale post-fire soil erosion modeling, land degradation, healthy soils, and the assessment, fate, and remediation of soil pollution in EU soils. Diana Vieira is also dedicated to knowledge transference and strongly believes that art and technology should go hand in hand, and is a fervent advocate for equity and diversity.
Dr. Eri Saikawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. She is the Director of both Graduate Studies and the Emory Climate Talks Program in the department. She is jointly appointed in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health and is also an affiliated faculty in the Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods, the East Asian Studies Program, as well as in the Center for Study of Law, Politics and Economics. She received a Bachelor of Engineering and studied chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Tokyo. She then received Master of Public Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, studying environmental policy and natural resource management. She pursued her Ph.D. in the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy program at Princeton University. She was a Postdoctoral Associate and a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before she joined Emory University in 2013. She is curious about anything related to air pollution and climate change. Her work includes assessing emissions from understudied sources, such as brick kilns and garbage burning. She is also working on climate-smart agriculture. Her team recently found heavy metal soil contamination in the Westside of Atlanta and it has led to a Superfund Site investigation by the EPA.
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