ERG is a col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity of grad­u­ate stu­dents, core fac­ulty, over 100 affil­i­ated fac­ulty and researchers across the cam­pus, and nearly 500 alumni across the globe. We award MA, MS, and PhD degrees to stu­dents work­ing across dis­ci­plines and depart­ments to cre­ate poten­tially trans­for­ma­tive knowl­edge for the planet. ERG is a world-renowned pro­gram with a […]

ERG has a small core faculty but a much larger group (100+) of affiliated faculty. Affiliated faculty are based in other departments on campus or at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and share ERG’s commitment to shared learning and interdisciplinary work.  They are advisors, mentors, or employers to ERG students, and serve on master’s project, […]

Please note: This is a full list of ERG course offerings; not all courses are offered each term. For current course offerings, please refer to the online Schedule of Classes. ENERES 39A – Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Complex Systems, Information Theory, and “Big Data” John Harte A premise of this seminar is that science, evolving […]

Master’s Degree in Energy and Resources The purpose of the ERG Master’s program is to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary leaders. Specifically, students are taught the range of methods and subjects they should be able to understand, advance, and critique to address critical issues stemming from the interaction of humans and the environment. To […]

Areas of Interest Climate Change Ecology Energy Governance Water International Climate Change ERG CORE David Anthoff David Anthoff is an environmental economist who studies climate change and environmental policy. He co-develops the integrated assessment model FUND that is used widely in academic research and in policy analysis John Harte John Harte’s research interests span ecological […]

Big Give was November 17, 2016. We thank you for giving big to ERG this year!   We ask you to consider pledges to the Energy and Resources Group Annual Discretionary Fund, which was established to provide program support to respond to ERG’s most urgent needs and to build on the excellence of our program. Make […]

Harte Lab: Ecology & Global Change

Ecology and global change are the primary topics of research in the Harte Lab. Among the goals are: to characterize ecological feedbacks to climate change, to predict effects of global change on biodiversity, and to develop fundamental theory that predicts the structure of ecosystems across spatial scales.

The purpose of the ERG Master’s program is to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary leaders. Specifically, students are taught the range of methods and subjects they should be able to understand, advance, and critique to address critical issues stemming from the interaction of humans and the environment. To that end, the requirements for the […]

PROGRAMS OFFERED AT ERG Master’s Degree in Energy and Resources (MA or MS) Master’s/Ph.D. Track ERG Concurrent Degree Programs (MPP/MA or MPP/MS) Matriculation from the Master’s or Track to the Ph.D. Ph.D. in Energy and Resources Undergraduate Minor in Energy and Resources     Master’s Degree in Energy and Resources The pur­pose of the ERG Master’s pro­gram […]

ERG students and faculty work across disciplines and departments to create transformative knowledge for the planet and its people. Forty years of ERG research has advanced the fields of global change ecology, renewable energy deployment, efficient energy systems, ecological economics, and equitable and affordable access to water and energy. Donate now to support ERG's unique culture of interdisciplinary research and teaching for a sustainable environment and a just society!

A Brief History of ERG For thirty years, the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley has provided its outstanding graduate students and exceptional faculty the scholarly conditions in which to:  study the environmental sciences, analyze the social causes of our energy and environmental problems, undertake field research in a variety […]

ERG Summer Courses Available

ERG is offering four of its most popular courses this summer! Enroll Today!

BOOK: Applying Anthropology and Physics to Sustainability

New book by Dove and Kammen released this week.

UC Berkeley Ranks 1st in the World for Environment

Subject-specific rankings from US New & World Report are based on academic research performance in those subjects.

Will Dr. Harte’s MaxEnt lead to a unified theory of ecology?

"MaxEnt breaks everything that we ever thought about communities and species and ecology."

Professor Harte Featured in DOE’s Symmetry

He transitioned from physics to ecology. And at ERG, he's not the only one.

I grew up in the rural North Bay, in a small town called Monte Rio, along the Russian River. I moved to Providence, RI to study at Brown University, where I majored in Anthropology and Latin American Studies. After graduating, I spent the next seven years or so doing community and labor organizing work, first […]

Nick earned his BS in Hydrology along with a minor in Environmental Policy from UC Davis in 2013. Since graduating, he spent over three years working for the Stockholm Environment Institute based in their Davis, CA office participating in watershed modeling and management projects for river basins in California, Perú, and Ecuador. He then worked […]

I’m a first years master’s student and received a B.S. & B.A. from UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology and Molecular Environmental Biology. Prior to coming to ERG, I worked on quantifying rates of nitrogen fixation by bacteria associated with conifer foliage in Western U.S. forests. I’m broadly interested in the dynamics of community-level responses to […]

Lara Kueppers

Lara Kueppers is an Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group, with a Faculty Scientist appointment at Berkeley Lab. She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist, whose research focuses on ecological responses and feedbacks to climate change.

Hilary Yu

Hilary received her B.A. in Government and Biological Sciences, with a concentration in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the latter, from Cornell University, where she graduated in 2015. At ERG, Hilary is interested in exploring the science-law nexus and the factors – political, economic, and social – that inform the translation of science into legislation. […]

Esther Shears

Esther is interested in integrated assessment models and the role of tropical forests and land cover in climate change mitigation. She also studies sustainable agroforestry and the environmental governance of global supply chains. Prior to beginning her graduate studies at UC Berkeley, she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice as a statistician in the […]

Adam Hanbury-Brown

Adam is interested in how climate change and biodiversity loss can be mitigated through agriculture, forestry, and conservation strategy. Prior to joining ERG, Adam worked with an early stage agriculture technology company called TerViva where he conducted research and business development to expand the adoption of novel, sustainable crops on marginal land. This work exposed […]

Rebecca Coates-Maldoon

Assessing Instream Flow Standards Under Climate Change Implications for State-Level Policy in the U.S. (MS/MPP ’17) Rebecca completed a Master’s degree in both the Energy and Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy (MA/MPP). Her research interests focus on the sustainable use of water resources, integrating work in ecology, equity, and climate change […]

Eli Lazarus

Eli is an Ecological Economist working toward the development of a metric combining the elements of sustainability, efficiency, and welfare as core values. He is interested in the potential of re-framing and quantifying value beyond the market mechanism in order to address the most profound problems we face as a species. Most recently, Eli was […]

Richard Barnes

Richard applies computational and mathematical techniques to better understand the complex interface of society and the environment. His work is focused on modelling the evolutionary dynamics of plants to find useful variants that nature could not build; on the side he worked to develop linear time parallel terrain analysis algorithms. A recipient of both the DOE […]