Agriculture

Rachel Ward

MS, PhD
Rachel is interested in the social, ecological, and geophysical dynamics of agro-forestry coffee and cacao systems in the tropics.

María Villalpando Páez

PhD
María is interested in exploring rural and peasant women’s role in the advancement of food sovereignty and in understanding the complex negotiation processes between communities, individuals, and the environment in rural and agricultural communities in Mexico.

Dawson Verley

MS

Dawson is a Master’s student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. His interests lie at the intersection of data science and sustainable development, with a focus on climate adaptation, agriculture, and natural resource economics. He’s currently studying weatherization policies in Europe and the domestic political economy of climate finance in Latin America. Before joining ERG, Dawson worked on natural resources policy in Alaska’s state legislature. He grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and holds a BA in Political Science from Stanford University.

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Sarah Sarfaty Epstein

MS

Sarah Sarfaty Epstein is a first year M.S. student interested in landscape-scale climate resilience decision making in California’s agriculture sector, particularly at the agriculture-energy-water nexus. Currently, Sarah is part of an equitable agrivoltaics research team, as the Berkeley Food Institute’s Policy Assistant.

Sarah has held a variety of professional roles in the environmental and human services sectors, most recently as an Associate at Ross Strategic where she worked on various food system, rural development and energy resource projects....

Julia Longmate

MS, PhD
Julia’s research focuses on the performance and usability of climate model outputs at decision-relevant scales.

Alex Hall Rocha

MS
Alex Hall Rocha is a Master’s student at the Energy and Resources Group. Her interests include community-based participatory research and how it can be used to address cases of environmental injustice.

Alix Blair Darling

PhD
Alix is an award-winning documentary maker, both in film and audio, and has been working in nonfiction storytelling for over a decade, as a creator and as a teacher, focusing on stories of human rights, women’s voices, environmental justice and trauma-awareness.

Kate Cullen

PhD
Kate Altemus Cullen (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Energy & Resources Group and Fulbright-Hays Fellow.

Cora Cliburn

MS
Cora is a second-year master’s student focused on climate adaptation and water in the West.

Sean Brown

MS
Sean Brown is a first year Master’s student interested in using the framework of complex systems to better understand natural and human subsystems as parts of a larger, integrated system, and to identify interactions and feedbacks between these domains in order to effectively address major environmental issues.