People

Timothy Farnham believes in the importance of interdisciplinary study to build a broad understanding of environmental issues and foster creative and practical solutions to real world problems. His scholarly interests focus on environmental values and how humans have perceived their place in the natural world throughout history.

A writer, teacher, photographer, and pilot, Lauret Savoy is also a woman of multiracial heritage. Her courses and writings explore the narratives we tell of the American land’s origins — and the narratives we tell of ourselves in this land, including the place of race. Winner of Mount Holyoke College’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. Senior classes have chosen her to be a Baccalaureate speaker and Last Lecturer.

Jennifer Albertine’s research focuses on how plant population responses to global change factors vary across the landscape. She is specifically interested in plants that impact human health through production of allergenic pollen, such as grasses and ragweed. Her multi-disciplinary research also touches the field of agro-ecology where she is interested in how global change will impact our agricultural system, through changes in pasture productivity, plant stress physiology, and competition between crops and weeds.

Kate Ballantine’s research uses restored ecosystems as an opportunity to learn about ecosystem processes and development. Ballantine and her students conduct basic and applied research to investigate how these restored wetlands develop and function, and what restoration methodologies may stimulate desirable (or undesirable!) ecosystem functions.

Catherine Corson is the Miller Worley Associate Professor of Environmental Studies. As a political ecologist, she uses ethnography to explore questions of power, knowledge, and justice in case studies from rural villages to international policy arenas. Her current research focuses on the rise of market-based environmentalism, popular resistance to it, and associated shifts in environmental governance. Prior to receiving her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, Corson spent a decade as an environment and development policy analyst. Her interdisciplinary academic training, in biology, development studies, and environmental economics, as well as political ecology, underpins an interest in interdisciplinary teaching and research.

Kevin Surprise’s research explores the political economy of global climate change. His recent work examines the material and discursive processes shaping solar geoengineering technology and policy in the U.S., and the implications of solar geoengineering for climate governance. Ongoing research analyzes the connections between solar geoengineering research, climate security discourse, and the U.S. military’s “command of the commons.” As a geographer interested in the ways in which politics, economy, and power intermingle with and shape environments, he teaches courses on international development, political ecology, capitalism and climate change, and environmental justice.

Alexi Arango’s research focuses on advancing renewable energy by employing new semiconductors in the production of solar cells. His lab studies how quantum dots, molecular dyes, metal oxides, and other novel semiconductors can be incorporated into third generation solar cells that are both highly efficient and less expensive to manufacture than conventional solar cells employing silicon.

Steve Dunn is passionate about rocks and minerals. His favorite course is Rocks and Minerals, GEOL-201. His background and interests are in the areas of metamorphic petrology and geochemistry. He enjoys researching the geology of the 1.3-1.0 billion-year-old Grenville Province of southern Ontario. Dunn loves to spend time in his geochemistry laboratory, collecting CO2 from calcite and combusted graphite (his favorite mineral!) for stable isotope analysis. These data allow him to reconstruct the geological history of rocks that were once buried deep in the earth’s crust. Dunn’s courses include Environmental Geology, Rocks and Minerals, Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, Geological Resources and the Environment, and the Death Valley Field Course.

Ecologist Martha Hoopes is interested in how species coexist and even more in why they don't. Her research focuses on invasion ecology and conservation biology and the human interactions with the environment that lead to interactions between invasive species and rare species. Hoopes and her students study invasive plant species in the Quabbin, Harvard Forest, and on Mount Holyoke property, using fieldwork, mathematical models, and statistical approaches to explore spatial dynamics and metacommunities, or how communities interact through dispersal.

Girma Kebbede's research and teaching interests are the interrelations between politics and development, human dimensions of environmental change, and socio-economic and political causes and consequences of political conflicts in Africa. His books in these interests include The State and Development in Ethiopia (1992) and Sudan’s Predicaments: Civil War, Displacement and Ecological Degradation (1999), Urban Environmental Health Risks: the Case of Ethiopia (2004), and Environment and Society in Ethiopia (2017). 

As a structural geologist interested in the nature and timing of fabric development in both metamorphic and igneous rocks, Michelle Markley has packed her trusty rock hammer for field work in the Canadian Grenville, the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, and overseas in the Southern Alps of New Zealand and the Western Alps of Switzerland. Markley’s teaching interests are diverse; she has taught courses on Appalachian geology, diamonds, earthquakes, structural geology, historical geology, and Uranium.

Thomas L. Millette is a geographer and geoprocessing specialist with broad research interests in the applications of remote sensing and GIS to environmental monitoring and management. Thomas has applied image processing of satellite data to a wide variety of environmental assessments. Most recently, Millette has developed the Airborne Multispectral Imaging System (AIMS) to develop high-resolution imagery (4.0 cm) to identify forest pests (Asian Longhorned Beetle and Wooly Adelgid), and to conduct thermal ungulate surveys (moose and deer) and habitat analysis. Thomas also collaborates with the Umass Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory’s airborne radar interferometry research program.

Stan Rachootin teaches what evolved (Introductory Biology, Terrestrial Arthropods, Invertebrate Zoology), how evolution might work (Evolution, Macroevolution), and how evolution evolved (Darwin). He has advised theses on how flatfish evolved from round fish, why a tiny fly preserved in amber made eye lenses on its wings, and what the differences in shapes of closely related snails teach us about metaphor in statistics. Each project takes a new problem, though most find that development can help disentangle an evolutionary mystery.

A specialist in glacial geology, environmental geology, and climate change, as well as a groundwater geologist, Alan Werner's research focuses on past environmental change. "Although we tend to think that planet Earth is stable and unchanging, in fact, the geologic record indicates that profound changes have taken place on a variety of timescales," says Werner. He studies records of climate change to document the nature and timing of climate events in various locations in the Arctic.

Leszek Bledzki is a limnologist, ecologist and forester, and senior research associate of the Miller-Worley Center for the Environment, Environmental Studies and Biology Departments. He provides curricular support for environmentally-related laboratories in science courses; manages the collection/archival of water quality and weather data; and is assisting faculty and students with independent research. Bledzki's research interests range from biostatistics and modeling, through ecosystems functioning, global climate change, nitrogen and carbon cycling in temperate peatlands to taxonomy, ecology and biogeography of Rotifera, Cladocera and Copepoda. Bledzki has published over 90 peer-reviewed and popular-press articles.