Faculty & Students

Sections: Faculty - Postdoctoral Fellows - Collaborators - Graduate Students - Research Assistants - Former Students

Faculty

Faculty associated with the former VIEE and current Climate and Energy Forum come from a number of Vanderbilt's schools and departments, bringing the collective skills and expertise necessary to address today's tough energy and environmental problems, while simultaneously educating tomorrow's leaders.

• Mark Abkowitz , Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• John Ayers , Professor & Chair of Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Jack Barkenbus, Visiting Scholar in VIEE and Climate Change Research Network
• Hiba Baroud , Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Corey Brady , Assistant Professor, College of Education and Human Development
• Janey Camp , Research Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Mark Cohen , Professor of American Competitive Enterprise & Professor of Law
• David Furbish , Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Jonathan Gilligan , Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Steven Goodbred , Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Bradley Hawkins , Practicum Director, Vanderbilt MPH Program, Health Policy
• David Hess , Associate Director of VIEE & Professor of Sociology 
• George Hornberger , Director of VIEE & Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Kejia Hu , Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Owens Graduate School of Management
• Bruce Jennings , Adjunct Associate Professor in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society and the Department of Health Policy at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center
• David Kosson , Co-Director of CRESP & Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Euguene LeBoeuf , Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Michelle Marcus , Assistant Professor of Economics
• Yolanda McDonald , Assistant Professor, VU Department of Human and Organizational Development
• David Owens , Professor for the Practice of Management and Innovation
• Craig Philip , Research Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director, Vanderbilt Center for Transportation and Operational Resilience (VECTOR)
• Jim Rossi , Professor of Law and Director, Program in Law & Government
• JB Ruhl , Director, Program on Law and Innovation and Professor of Law
• Ryan Trahan , Research Associate Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies
  
• Zdravka Tzankova , Associate Professor of Sociology
• Michael Vandenbergh , Director of Climate Change Research Network & Professor of Law
• W. Kip Viscusi , Professor of Law, Economics and Management
• Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins , Assistant Professor of Economics
• Carol Ziegler , Assistant Professor, School of Nursing

Community and University Collaborators

• Dodd Galbreath , Director, Institute of Sustainable Practice Graduate Program, Lipscomb University
• Andrea George , Director of SustainVU
• Todd Lawrence , Director for Urban Green Lab
• Chris Lunghino , Founder and Consultant at Community Sustainability USA, Inc.
• Jim Redwine , Vice President and Chief Operations Officer, Harpeth Conservancy
• Janos Sztipanovits , Director, Institute for Software integrated Systems, Vanderbilt University

Postdoctoral Fellows

Postdoctoral fellows have a unique blend of expertise in the social and natural sciences. The postdoctoral fellows work closely with each other and with VIEE faculty and students to conduct cutting-edge research on energy and environmental issues.

Former Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows

Josh Bazuin
Research Focus: Post-conflict transitions, international community development efforts (especially around housing, poverty alleviation, and the environment), and the role of religion in peace-building and development.

Laura Mahoney Benneyworth
Research Focus: Evaluation of land use and drinking water quality in southwestern Bangladesh and implications for sustainability and community resilience.

Emily Burchfield
Research Focus: How water allocation decisions, and socioeconomic, institutional, and environmental factors, affect cropping patterns and the distribution of crop health

Amanda Carrico
Research Focus: The psychology of environmentally significant behavior; common pool resource management; behavioral dimensions of climate mitigation and adaptation policy

John Crane
Dissertation Research Focus: The Thermo-climatic Cost of a Lush, Green Lawn: Characterizing N2O emissions from lawns

Thushara De Silva
Research Focus: developing decision supporting models for water resources and energy infrastructure planning & management of Sri Lanka

Ke "Jack" Ding
Research Focus: the inter-relationships of the Water-Energy-Food nexus, and providing sustainable solutions to the WEF issues globally

Leslie Lyons Duncan
Research Focus: Local and regional hydrological and subsurface conditions in regulation of the mechanical behavior of landslides and in relation to changing river flows

Alexandra Ewing
Dissertation Research Focus: Life cycle analysis of alternative corporate sustainability strategies

Elizabeth Stone Gerding
Research Focus: Variations of climate, soil properties, and paddy cultivation practices in the Mahaweli River Watershed and the effects on rice yields, greenhouse gas emissions, and the percolation of nitrogen species into groundwater and canals

Thushara Gunda
Research Focus: Analyzing natural and social drivers (including climate and governance) on water security. Evaluating the complex interactions between water, food, energy, and waste resources.

Elise Hunter
Research Focus:  Regional variations in freshwater supply in the US, urban drinking water management and planning, perceptions of water use and climate change

John H. Jacobi
Research Focus: Adaptive Actions to Climate Change

Dasom Lee
Research Focus: Digital energy and transportation technology, sustainability transitions, comparative policy, corporate social responsibility

Alexander Maki
Research Focus:  When and how individuals spread their proenvironmental behaviors to others (the “spread of behavior”), the factors that make it more likely people will engage in a range of proenvironmental behaviors across contexts (the “spillover of behavior”), and why some people successfully engage in proenvironmental behaviors over time (the “maintenance of behavior”).

Rachel McKane
Research Focus: Environmental Justice, Environmental Sociology, Urban Transportation Justice, Quantitative Methods

Yi Mei
Research Focus: Hydrology, hillslope control on DOC-concentration discharge relationships

John Nay
Research Focus: Modeling social-ecological system resilience to climate change impacts in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Kate Nelson
Research Focus: Impacts of planning and policy on the sustainability of socio-environmental systems by examining the effects of policies on hazard impacts, evaluating adaptation strategies, and developing decision support tools to help reduce vulnerability and increase resilience

Deb Perrone
Research Focus: Water, energy, and food in a changing climate

Chelsea Peters
Research Focus:  Anthropological impacts on water quality

Kate Pride-Brown
Research Focus: Power relationships and their impact on the natural world; the environmental movement in Russia

Kaitlin Toner Raimi
Research Focus: How people explain away harmful behaviors, how people compare their own beliefs and behaviors to those of other people, and how people’s desire to make a good impression can influence them to adopt climate mitigation behaviors.

Sharon Shewmake
Research Focus: Environmental economics, energy economics, resource economics, transportation, and economic development

Lanka Thabrew
Research Focus: Life cycle assessment, multi-stakeholder environmental decision making, and international sustainable development research

Heather Barnes Truelove
Research Focus: Psychological underpinnings of individual behavior to reduce climate change, and attitudes toward nuclear energy and nuclear facilities

Scott Worland
Research Focus: Analyzing the complex interactions of political, demographic, economic, hydrologic, and climatological factors that affect decisions that either advance or retard the development of water conservation policies.

Graduate Students

Kayla Anderson, Ph.D. Candidate, Community Research and Action

Kaelee Belletto, Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology

Mariah Caballero, Ph.D. Candidate, Community Research and Action

Kelsey Best, Ph.D. Candidate, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Claire Evans , Ph.D. candidate, Political Science

Ethan Gibbons , Ph.D. candidate, Sociology

Megan Jordan , Ph.D. candidate, Sociology

Miguel Moravec, Ph.D. candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering