Other EVR People: Core Faculty | Staff | Graduate Students
As a strongly multi-disciplinary program, Environmental Studies draws on the expertise of numerous faculty members in other departments at Florida International University and other Professionals in South Florida. These Affiliated and Adjunct Faculty members teach environmental courses or relevant electives in their own departments, serve on (and may even chair) graduate student committees, and provide additional independent study opportunities to undergraduates.
William Anderson, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Z), 2000
Dr. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. He is the Director of the SERC Isotope Laboratory, where current research focuses on the oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotopic signature in organic material. Recent work has focused on calibration and reconstruction of the isotopic hydrologic cycle from terrestrial archives (tree rings and lake sediments) located in Europe, East Africa, and South America. Present work focuses on applying new continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry (CF-IRMS) methods to biogeocemical orientated projects in the Everglades, The Keys, Florida Bay, and other tropical locations such as Brazil.
Whitney Bauman, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California
Whitney Bauman is Assistant Professor of Religion and Science in the Department of Religious Studies at FIU. He joined the FIU community from Berkeley, where he completed graduate school at the Graduate Theological Union and worked as the 2007 Research Associate with the Forum on Religion and Ecology. Whitney's interests lie in the intersection of religion, nature, and politics. He is currently the Assistant Editor for The Spirit of Sustainability (Berkshire Publishers, 2009), Book Review Editor for Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology, and his book, Theology, Creation and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius will be published with Routledge in March 2009. Whitney teaches courses such as: Earth Ethics / Ethics and the Environment, Religion and Science, Bio-Ethics, and Religion Gender and Nature.
Patrick Belmont, Affiliated Researcher
Ph.D. Lehigh University 2007
Dr. Belmont is a postdoctoral research associate for the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, based at Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. His research encompasses geomorphology and aquatic ecology with primary interests in landscape evolution, sediment transport and understanding the dynamic feedbacks between living organisms and the physical landscape they inhabit. Dr. Belmont's recent and ongoing work involves sediment fingerprinting, quantification of light transparency in aquatic systems and measurements of short- and long-term landscape erosion rates.
Bradley Bennett, Professor
Ph.D. The University of North Carolina 1988
Dr. Bennett is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. His primary focus is ethnobotany in lowland regions of the Neotropics. His research addresses the questions 1) What botanical resources do traditional people use? 2) How do traditional people use and manage these botanical resources? And 3) Why do people use particular plants? Few researchers address this last topic, yet it is perhaps the most interesting. The "Why?" question encompasses a variety of possible explanations at both proximate and ultimate levels. Tradition, form-function (doctrine of signatures), taxonomic affiliation, efficacy, empiricism, and exchange (diffusion), all may play a role in determining which plants will be utilized.
Yong Cai, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Nankai University 1985
Dr. Cai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry. His research interests are in the field of environmental chemistry of organometallic compounds, which include the development of new analytical techniques for speciation of some important organometallics and their fate and transport in the environment. The present research is focusing on the development of new sample preparation and analytical methods for the determination of organomercury compounds in environmental samples (soil/sediments, water, biota), and the biogeochemical cycling of mercury in the aquatic ecosystems.
Shlomi Dinar, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 2004
Dr. Dinar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations. His main research interests combine international relations, geography, negotiation theory, and international environmental issues. Specifically, he has published on issues encompassing conflict, cooperation, and negotiation over transboundary water resources.
Maureen Donnelly, Professor and Associate Dean
Ph.D. University of Miami
Dr. Donnelly is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. She is a taxon-based scientist whose research focuses on the ecology and evolutionary biology of tropical amphibians and reptiles. She has focused on tropical ecology, tropical herpetology, and tropical conservation since 1979 and has worked on declining amphibians in the Neotropics, explored three Venezuelan tepuis, explored lowland forest in central Guyana, worked on space-use patterns in a Costa Rican frog (Dendrobates pumilio), completed her study of reproduction in Eleutherodactylus bransfordii, continued to work on the key to amphibians and reptiles of the La Selva Biological Station, described new species of tepui amphibians and reptiles, worked on restoration of alluvial forest in Costa Rica, and initiated research in central Florida.
Elvira Durán, Affiliated Researcher
Ph.D. National Autonomous University of Mexico 2004.
Dr. Durán's research interests are in Community Ecology, especially in tropical deciduous forests in Mexico, and Mapping Vegetation and Land Use/Cover Change Analysis at different scales (local to national). On the second subject, she has focused on land use/cover change in community-managed forests in Mexico. Dr. Durán collaborates closely with Dr. David Bray, and the two are currently working on a research project on deforestation, common property and civil violence in watersheds along the Pacific coast of Mexico, as well as continued work on land use/cover change in community forests, and will be working on articles together.
Juliet Erazo, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan 2003
Dr. Erazo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research examines the history of indigenous organizing in the Ecuadorian Amazon with particular attention to how indigenous leaders have worked to shape their constituents’ land use practices and property regimes. More broadly, she is interested in environmental politics, indigenous organizing, the relationships between international development philosophies and local practices, and state-society relations. During the Spring 2007 and 2008 semesters, Dr. Erazo will be teaching the core course for the Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Communities (SYD 6901).
Jim Fourqurean, Professor
Ph.D. University of Virginia 1992
Dr. Fourqurean is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. His research interests include biogeochemistry of the coastal ocean, nutrient cycling in the marine environment, primary productivity of aquatic systems, seagrass physiological ecology, and ecosystem modeling. He teaches undergraduate courses in Ecology, Ecology Lab, Freshwater Ecology and graduate courses in Advanced Ecology - Communities and Ecosystems, Ecology of Marine Vascular Plants, Techniques in Seagrass Ecology, Techniques in Plant Nutrient Analysis, Introduction to Biological Research.
Jennifer (Zhaohui) Fu, GIS Center Head
M.L.S. State University of New York at Albany 1993
Ms. Zhaohui Jennifer Fu is the founding director of the Library GIS-RS Center at Florida International University. She is also an adjunct professor of Environmental Studies Dept. and the founding chair of the Certificate Program in Geographic Information Systems at FIU. She teaches "Introduction to GIS and Environmental Data Analysis." Her areas of interest include Geographic Information Systems, Image processing, data analysis and modelling, web database development, and 3D visualization. She provides GIS training and consulting to FIU students and faculty and leads GIS related research projects and contracts.
Evelyn Gaiser, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Georgia 1997
Dr. Gaiser is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC). Dr. Gaiser's primary research focuses on algae, and she is particularly interested in determining how algal communities respond to long-term changes in the environment. Tracking relationships between species and environment depends on proper identification of organisms and obtaining either spatially or temporally explicit records of their abundance, so her research has a large emphasis on taxonomy, environmental monitoring and paleoecology. Much of her current research focuses on the role of periphyton in the Everglades ecosystem.
Daniel Gann, Research Associate GIS-RS Center
M.S. Florida International University 2003
Daniel Gann earned his Master of Science from department of Environmental Studies, Florida International University. He oversees the technical and scientific research aspects of the GIS-RS Center's projects. He teaches Applied Remote Sensing (GLY 5754) for the Earth Sciences department. His research interests include uncertainty in remote sensing and geographic information sciences, integrated image processing algorithms to map land cover at variable scales, visualization of multidimensional data and geographic database development for integrated watershed resources management.
Piero Gardinali, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Texas A&M University 1996
Dr. Gardinali is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry. His research focuses on studies regarding the origin, fate and transport of anthropogenic organic compounds in freshwater and coastal environments. His group is particularly interested in highly toxic halogenated compounds such as co-planar polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins and furans as well as pesticides, herbicides and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their metabolites and degradation products in aquatic organisms and soil/sediments. Dr. Gardinali's group is also involved in the development of analytical techniques for the analysis of trace organic compounds in environmental samples.
Jennifer Gebelein, Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara 2001
Dr. Gebelein is a Visting Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. Her areas of specialization are geographic information systems, remote sensing, land use/land cover mapping, and comparative analysis of ecosystems. Her research includes support from NASA to map landmasses adjacent to coral reef systems utilizing Landsat Thematic Mapper Imagery as well as some IKONOS and aerial photography. The purpose is to establish worldwide classification algorithms that can be applied to satellite images in the future to create maps of major vegetation; soil and other land cover classes.
Michael Heithaus, Associate Professor and Marine Sciences Director
Ph.D. Simon Fraser University
Dr. Heithaus is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. His primary interests are in how behavioral interactions among species shape community dynamics and how understanding behavior can enhance conservation strategies. Over the past 10 years, he and his collaborators have been working to understand the dynamics of a pristine seagrass community in Western Australia. In particular, they have focused on predator-prey interactions and the role of tiger sharks in shaping the behavior of their prey. Dr. Heithaus also has students working on the role of predators in shaping community dynamics within marine protected areas of Florida and the role of sharks in nutrient flow within the coastal Everglades.
James Huchingson, Emeritus Professor
Ph.D. Emory University 1977
Dr. Huchingson is Emertitus Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. His training is in contemporary religious thought, but his interests go far beyond any narrow specialization. He teaches courses ranging from the popular Studies in World Religions to Religion in the Information Age, Science and Religion, and Plagues in Medicine and Myth. His pioneering science and religion course has received two international awards, and his text anthology in the field is widely used. He teaches Earth Ethics as a required course for Environmental Studies. His newest course, Native American Religion, is supported by the University’s Endowment for Native American Religion.
Gail Hollander , Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Iowa, 1999
Dr. Hollander is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations. She specializes in Economic Geography, World Food System Theory, Geography of Florida and the Caribbean, Feminist Geography, Regional Development, and Agro-Environmental Conflict.
Rudolf Jaffe, Professor
Ph.D. Indiana University 1985
Dr. Jaffe is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Director of the Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC). His expertise is in the area of environmental analytical chemistry and organic geochemistry. He is particularly interested in the application of biomarker analysis in determining the origin, fate and transport of organic matter in tropical and subtropical aquatic environments. In addition, his group studies anthropogenic molecular markers (pollutants) in the environment, including petroleum hydrocarbons, pesticides, herbicides, sewage markers and other organic pollutants. Finally, his group has been studying the interaction of trace metals and organo-metals (particularly mercury) with colloids and sediments, and analytical methods development for environmental and geochemical samples.
Jeff Joens, Professor
Ph.D. Indiana University 1984
Dr. Joens is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry. He isinterested in several problems in the areas of molecular spectroscopy, environmental chemistry, and molecular complexes. One focus area is the experimental measurement of UV-visible spectra of small molecules. For the past several years he and his students have been interested in obtaining high precision absorption cross-sections for small molecules for use in atmospheric chemistry. The emphasis of this research has been in working with molecules with continuous electronic spectra, although they have also carried out low resolution cross-section measurements on molecules with resolvable vibrational and/or rotational structure, such as is found in the UV spectrum of sulfur dioxide.
B. M. Golam Kibria, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Western Ontario 1997
Dr. Kibria is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics, FIU. His research interests include predictive inference, pre-test and shrinkage estimation, regression analysis, computational statistics and environmental statistics. Estimation of parameters in linear regression models, particularly in the cases of multicollinearity and when there are stochastic restrictions and a non-normal error distribution. His present research is focusing on the estimation of the optimal significance level for pre-test estimators and the application of matric t distribution in spatial predictive inference. His research interests also include the application of statistics in the filed of economics, environmental, biological and medical sciences and fitting the poisson and negative binomial models for air pollution and transportation data.
Suzanne Koptur, Professor
Ph.D University of California, Berkeley 1982
Dr. Koptur is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her research interests include pollination of pine rockland plants, habitat fragmentation and pollination of South Florida pine rockland plants, developing ecological criteria for fire in South Florida pine rockland ecosystems, hurricane effects on vegetation and insect/plant interactions, extrafloral nectaries and insect/plant interactions, Inga ecology, and sedges and their herbivores.
David Lee, Professor
Ph.D. Rutgers University 1970
Dr. Lee is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. For the past 25 years, virtually all of his research has been in the area of functional ecology, almost exclusively of tropical plants. His work continues to be mostly tropical, but some of the phenomena have led him back to temperate plants. Long-term interests in the cultures of south and southeast Asia, the result of living in these areas has led to a minor research interest in the relationships of these cultures to their environments.
Rod Neumann, Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley 1992
Dr. Neumann is a Professor in the Department of International Relations. His interests include social theory and human-environment relations as well as African studies and political ecology. He travels frequently to Africa, especially Tanzania, studying the cultural and historical roots of political conflict between peasantries and conservation advocates, landscape representation and social constructions of nature in European colonialism, contemporary development initiatives, and the introduction of modernity in Africa. His research has been published in Antipode, Society and Space, and Development and Change, among others.
Steve Oberbauer, Professor
Ph.D. Duke University 1983
Dr. Oberbauer is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. The questions guiding his research are: How do plants physiologically adjust to changes in limiting resources? What are the physiological and phenological constraints on plant responses to changing resources? What are the ecosystem consequences of these plant responses to changing resources? He is interested in the responses of ecosystems to expected climate change resulting from human-induced increases in the atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane. He has initiated a global change project at Toolik Lake, Alaska on the effects of increased season length on ecosystem response of tundra. He also conducts research on the responses of ecosystems to global change phenomenon in Costa Rica and the Everglades.
George O’Brien, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Iowa, 1985
Dr. O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Science Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. During his tenure at FIU, he has worked with colleagues to integrate mathematics, science, and technology in courses and programs; taught and researched issues in interdisciplinary studies; and studied constructivist-based instruction and learning. His research interests include issues in science teacher preparation, environmental education, and elementary science education.
Laura Ogden, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. The University of Florida 2002
Dr. Ogden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. An environmental anthropologist, she investigates the process by which people invest natural landscapes with cultural significance. Her current research is with gladesmen in the Florida Everglades, white settlers who traditionally supported themselves by alligator hunting and commercial fishing. In addition, she works with state and federal agencies involved in Everglades Restoration initiatives to develop social science research planning and public engagement strategies.
Kevin O'Shea , Professor
Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles 1989
Dr. O'Shea is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry. His research projects focus on mechanistic organic chemistry particularly related to radical and photochemical processes. The main goal of the current research program is to achieve a fundamental mechanistic understanding of semiconductor photocatalyic, radiolytic, and sonolytic induced oxidation of organic pollutants in aqueous solutions. We use product and kinetic studies to establish the reaction pathways of hydroxyl radicals with a variety of organic compounds and chemical pollutants. The fundamental information obtained from these studies has been useful in developing predictive models.
René Price, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Miami 2001
Dr. Price is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. Her research interests include the general areas of hydrogeology and low-temperature aqueous geochemistry. More specifically, research involves using chemical tracers, including the isotopes of oxygen, hydrogen, and helium, to identify groundwater flow paths, groundwater ages and groundwater-surface water interactions. Research has also included investigating water-rock interactions associated with seawater intrusion into coastal carbonate aquifers in the Florida Everglades and in Mallorca, Spain. Current research involves using chemical tracers to identify groundwater discharge along coastlines. A current research project involves using stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen to estimated evaporation rates from Florida Bay.
Stewart Reed, Affiliated Researcher
Ph.D. Virginia Tech 1993
Dr. Reed is a Research Agronomist with the USDA/ARS Subtropical Horticulture Research Station in Miami, FL. His primary research interest is flood tolerance in vegetable crops. More specifically, his research involves best management practices on periodically flooded agricultural lands and areas with a raised water table due to their proximity to Everglades National Park. Research results on the effects of flooding on crop growth and development, nutrient mineralization in soil, the development of mycorrhizal associations and fertilization techniques are used to develop crop growth models for areas impacted by the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project.
Laurie L. Richardson, Professor and Chair
Ph.D. University of Oregon, Eugene 1985
Dr. Richardson is Professor and Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her research is focused on coral health and disease, with an emphasis on the microbiology, microbial ecology, and microbial physiology of coral pathogens. She and her graduate students are studying coral reefs in the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, and the Philippines. Using microbiological, ecological, and molecular techniques, her lab has a long-term goal of understanding coral diseases and their relationship with environmental factors to aid current efforts to counteract coral reef decline.
Jay Sah, Affiliated Researcher
Ph.D. Florida International University 2002
Dr. Sah is a Visiting Research Scientist with the Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC). His primary research interest is in interdisciplinary approach to natural resource management. His focus is on vegetation dynamics in response to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, including the use of plant resources. Currently, Dr. Sah works on vegetation responses to fire and changes in hydrological regimes. He also investigates ecosystem processes and their management implications in marl prairies and the tree islands in freshwater Everglades, the coastal wetlands of the Southeast Saline Everglades, the tropical and sub-tropical upland forests of the Miami Rock Ridge and adjacent islands, and the floodplains in the protected areas of Nepal.
Mike Sukop, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Kentucky 2001
Dr. Sukop is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. His research is focused on environmental fluid mechanics and particularly on new modeling approaches for fluid flow and solute and heat transport and their application to challenging problems in fractured and karstic rock hydrology, seawater intrusion, and solute- and temperature-induced buoyancy. He maintains interests in fluid dynamics in variably saturated fractured and porous media from pore to aquifer scales, multiphase fluids, porous media, fractals, multifractals, cellular automata, percolation phenomena, stochastics, geostatistics, and water and surface chemistry.
Joel Trexler, Professor
Ph. D. Florida State University 1986
Dr. Trexler is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. Over the past 10 years, he has become very interested in the challenges presented by management and restoration of the Florida Everglades. His interest in this massive public-works project has arisen partly because it seeks to preserve a spectacular ecosystem at his backdoor, but also because of the problems presented to biologists in proceeding with restoration. He and his students are investigating how changing patterns of productivity affect community structure of aquatic animals. His lab is also investigating how the controls of fish community and population dynamics change along the salinity and productivity gradients in the southern Everglades.
Kevin Whelan , Affiliated Researcher
Ph.D. Florida International University 2005
Dr. Whelan is the Aquatic Ecologist for the South Florida Caribbean Inventory and Monitoring Network. His general interests are in the areas of disturbance ecology, restoration management, water quality, hydrological impacts on wetland ecosystems (both flora and fauna). Research topics have included population dynamics of flora and fauna, hurricane and lightning disturbance, global warming, and restoration ecology. His South Florida research experiences have convinced him that everything is affected by regional dynamics crossing both political and natural boundaries.