Announcing the 2019-2020 NRT LandscapeU Student Cohort!

Lina Tami Barrera is completing the MS program in Rural Sociology and International Agriculture and Development and transitioning to PhD at the same program in Penn State. She has an MBA from the EAE-Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain) and a BA in Economics from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. She has extensive experience working on rural development and agriculture and food system issues, including technology transfer and innovation, climate change adaptation, and emergency relief and disaster recovery. Her research interests are related to Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS), rural youth issues and sustainability from the public policy perspective. During her MS program, Lina was a Fulbright scholar from Colombia working with Penn State’s Cacao for Peace Project, her thesis examines “Socio-economic factors that influence technology innovation in cacao farms in post-conflict regions in Colombia”.

 

Adrian Benedetti is a Doctoral candidate in the Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management Department. His research interests include Latin American visitor use of protected areas, nature-based tourism and community development, and human dimensions of natural resource management. He received his bachelor’s from University of Colorado in Humanities and his master’s from Colorado State University in Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management. Adrian is Panamanian and in 2013 he founded Fundación Caminando Panamá , an NGO that assists in promoting outdoor recreation among Panamanians and developing rural hiking experiences that benefit local community members. He is also an Outing Coordinator for the Pennsylvania chapter of Latino Outdoors.

 

Lauren Dennis is a first year PhD student in the Water Resources Engineering Program in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State. Prior to entering the Water Resources Engineering Program, she studied methane emissions from potential stray gas migration in an area of shale gas development in Northeastern Pennsylvania and received a master’s degree in Meteorology and Atmospheric Science from Penn State. She received a BS in Environmental Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of New Mexico. Her educational path has been motivated by the desire to help communities make strategic environmental decisions, and her PhD studies will focus on topics within the Food-Energy-Water nexus. 

 

 

Stephanie Freeman is a second-year PhD student pursuing a dual degree in Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management & Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment. She received her MS in Wildlife Science at Texas Tech University and her BS in Psychology from the University of Georgia. Her research interests fall broadly within the conservation social sciences, with an emphasis on human-wildlife interactions, park and protected area management, visitor use, and environmental communication. As a member of the Protected Areas Research Collaborative (PARC) at Penn State University, her work is both experimental and applied in nature. More information can be found at: http://stephanieelizabethfreeman.com

 

 

 

Zachary Goldberg currently studies geography at Penn State. His current interests focus on agricultural-unconventional energy nexus, working to expand visions of the future to include agroecology and alternative agriculture. He recently completed a Master’s degree studying socio-ecological impacts agricultural development in Morocco. Zach has previously earned a degree at Mcgill University in Environmental Science, focusing on food production, and has worked on numerous farms as a production manager and educator. Additional information can be found at https://www.geog.psu.edu/directory/zach-goldberg

 

 

Susan Kotikot has a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Planning and Management from Kenyatta University in Kenya and a master’s degree in Earth System Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Previously, she has worked as a remote sensing technician performing land use and land cover mapping tasks with the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development in Kenya, graduate assistant working on geospatial analysis and climate related impacts on agriculture with SERVIR and, research associate working on geospatial analysis of climate change impacts on critical infrastructure and natural disasters resilience at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She begins her PhD studies in Geography in the Fall of 2019. Her general interests are in climate change, landscape dynamics, agro-ecosystems, remote sensing and GIS data and methods. Her graduate research will potentially focus on agro-ecosystem dynamics resulting from climate change and implications on ecosystem health and impacts on water and forest resources and food security.

 

Catherine Mendel is a first year PhD student in the department of Anthropology. She recently graduated from the Ohio State University with a bachelor’s of science in evolution and ecology and a bachelor’s of science in anthropology. While an undergraduate, she participated in two NSF-REUs (one in bio-physics and one in archaeology) and conducted research in four laboratories ultimately focusing her own research on the domestication spectrum and the mutualistic relationship it represents. Since obtaining her bachelor’s degrees Catherine has been employed as a Naturalist with the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks. Her position with the park includes biological and behavioral observations of animals and plants, biological surveys, supporting threatened native species, public education and public outreach.  Her research interests include human ecology, human-environmental interactions, human-animal interactions with a particular interest in ecosystem dynamics and  human-avian mutualisms.

 

Paniz Mohammadpour is a Ph.D. candidate in the Water Resources Engineering program at Penn State. She received her MS in Civil Engineering (Water Resources Engineering and Management) from the University of Tehran and her BS in Civil Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. Her MS thesis focused on developing a sustainability index for water supply and demand. Her research interests are in the areas of Water-Food-Energy (WFE) nexus, surface and groundwater hydrology, sustainable development, and uncertainty analysis. At Penn State, she works for the FEWsLab where her research focus is on the water-food-energy nexus security. She has completed work on WFE security indices at a regional scale and is currently working on network analyses of the U.S. commodity supply chain to assess the vulnerability of U.S. ports across the nexus.

 

 

Ruchi Patel is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Penn State. Her research focuses broadly on conservation and development in Latin America, including how related policies interact with social processes such as conflict and migration to influence landscape change and management. She holds a MS in Geography from Penn State and a BS in Ecology and Natural Resources from Rutgers University. Prior to starting graduate school, she worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics in Washington, DC. She also served with the US Peace Corps in Paraguay, where she worked with local institutions and community groups to develop and implement projects for environmental education, reforestation, and community development.

 

Paulo Soares is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State, with  a bachelor’s and  master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in Brazil. Since  undergraduate school,  Paulo’s been researching renewable energy generation, focusing on wind power generation and solar power. Paulo decided that solar power, due mainly to the possibility of regular people generating their own electricity, would be the  main focus of research. Such decision brought him  to join Dr. Jeffrey Brownson’s Solar Ecology Collaborative group (a cohort of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff committed to bringing innovative approaches in terms of solar design and solar technologies, using disruptive technologies such as 3D printing and blockchain). Much of Paulo’s recent work is related to “The Solar Genome Project”,  which is focused on generating and open sharing of knowledge about the solar resource (sunlight, or solar irradiance), solar photovoltaic systems, and technologies related to monitoring those systems and the light resource, distributed among the largest possible group of people in Penn State operations, education, and research, across multiple campuses. Paulo, through research,  hopes  to help to build a stronger solar culture in our society. “The more people adopt solar technologies, the more sustainable our future tends to be.”

 

Nastaran Tebyanian is a Ph.D student in Architecture (with a focus on landscape architecture) at Penn State. She received her bachelor’s from the Art University of Isfahan in Architecture and her professional master’s in landscape architecture (MLA) from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. She also received her research-based master’s in landscape architecture (MSLA) from Penn State. Currently, she pursues a concurrent master’s degree in applied statistics. She has worked on several interdisciplinary projects from the regional assessment of cultural and natural resources in the Appalachian region to the evaluation of community-engaged study abroad programs.  She identifies herself as a complexity enthusiast and she is passionate about bringing the power of data science to environmental and urban planning and design problems. Her dissertation is on the role of green infrastructure in the resilience of urban food-energy-water nexus. Currently, she is working as a research collaborator for two projects: 1) Penn State Initiative for Resilient Communities (PSIRC): A Pilot to Develop Community-Based Solutions to Riverine Flooding 2) Developing a computational planting design and decision-making tool for assessing and predicting pollinator habitat resilience.

 

Saumya Vaishnava is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Geography at Penn State. She is interested in studying energy infrastructure projects and the manner in which they transform socio-political and physical elements of the landscape, as well as relationships between them. Prior to joining Penn State, Saumya worked on energy policy and governance issues in India. She has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Saint Xavier’s College, Mumbai and a master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po, Paris. Additional information can be found at  https://ww.geog.psu.edu/directory/saumya-vaishnava