Graduate Students

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Triffid Abel John Deporres Ayimbire Sandra Brown
Yosuke Adachi Jennifer Baca Jennifer Casolo
Glenna Anton Andrew Bliss Lifang Chiang
Javier Arbona Rachel Brahinsky Alicia Cowart

Triffid Abel

 Personal Interests:

E-mail: triffido@hotmail.com
BS 2004 (Environmental Science) Oregon State University
Research Interests: Her interests concern the biogeochemistry of physical environmental issues and analysis/modelling of compounds as they undergo processes (transport or chemical).
Regional Focus:

Yosuke Adachi

 Personal Interests: Since I am new to the Bay Area, I am excited to explore the many cultural and natural attractions that this place has to offer. I like meeting various people, discovering new places and learning languages. I like soccer, skiing and most other sports.
E-mail: yadachi@berkeley.edu
BS 2006 (Applied Chemistry) Keio University, Japan
Research Interests: Quantifying the current and future contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise.
Regional Focus: Greenland or Antartica

Glenna Anton

 Personal Interests:
E-mail: ganton@berkeley.edu
BA 1997 (Community Studies) UC Santa Cruz
MA 2006 (Geography) San Francisco State
Research Interests: Cultural, political and economic aspects of combined and uneven development of water in Israel-Palestine with special reference to the Intifadhas.
Regional Focus:

Javier Arbona

 Personal Interests: I like to read my junk email and sometimes weave portions of it into little, private poetry. I also enjoy cooking, running, and collage.

Websites:
contact info: http://jarbonahomar.googlepages.com/home
the Berkeley-Stanford City Group: http://groups.google.com/group/citywg
my evolving bookmarks on http://del.icio.us/javierarbona
suggested reading: http://subtopia.blogspot.com/
E-mail: javier@berkeley.edu
BA 1999 (Architecture) Cornell University
MS 2004 (Architecture and Urbanism) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: My official education in geography started in earnest at UC Berkeley but having been trained first as an architect, I reckon that I have been interested in this field for a long time. My work has moved somewhat away from the singular objects of my professional past, but these sent me on the path to seeking to know the underlying politics that shape the city as a whole. My curiosity about vernacular landscapes, architecture and the politics of memory led me to geography as an inquiry into the shaping of spaces. Previous writing I've done has centered on post-Cold War military landscapes that come to shape our ideas of nature. I wrote about the case of Vieques, Puerto Rico, in my master's thesis, condensed into in article that appeared in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Currently, I am interested in the Bay Area and the early 90s as a particularly effervescent period of spatial inventiveness and creativity. From newly opened military spaces to the challenge of biking rights, those years represent a cutting edge of public spatial practice that I am now looking at.
Regional Focus: California cities

John Deporres Ayimbire

 Personal Interests:
E-mail: himdeporres@yahoo.com
BA 2002 (Arts) University of Cape Coast in Ghana
Reearch Interests: The relationship between conflict, development, and the environment, particularly in Africa.
Regional Focus: Africa

Jennifer Baca

 Personal Interests:
E-mail: bacatron@gmail.com
BA 2004 (Human Biology) Stanford
Reearch Interests: Human-environment interactions and the geography of health in Latin America
Regional Focus: Latin America

Andrew Bliss

 Web sites:

My personal website with pictures and short descriptions of a few places I've been.

http://glacierbliss.com/

Satellite pictures of "our" icebergs

The Juneau Icefield Research Program A great summer opportunity for budding field scientists.

Iceberg Webcam
http:// thistle.org/iceberg/
New student - Photo pending
E-mail: abliss@berkeley.edu
BS 2001 (Geophysical Sciences) University of Chicago
Research Interests: Interplay of the ocean, atmosphere, and ice in the Ross Sea; climate change on global and local scales and how this might affect people living in a particular area. In detail: factors affecting the motion and spreading of large tabular icebergs in Antarctica; using the paleoclimate signals in an ice core from Taylor Glacier to force a model of the dynamics of the Taylor Glacier system.
Regional Focus: Antarctica, perhaps Greenland and the Sierra

Rachel Brahinsky

 Personal Interests: When I'm not reading or writing, I can usually be found walking San Francisco's many hills, playing or listening to music, or rolling out a mat somewhere for yet another downward facing dog.

I am on the board of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness,
publishers of the The Street Sheet
E-mail: rbrahinsky@berkeley.edu
BA 1996 (Social history and non-fiction writing) Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
Research Interests: I'm interested in how the compressed environments of cities affect people and how urban populations live, fight, and survive. My research looks at historical moments in which great cultural shifts are molded by capital flows and mended by political uprising. I look for ways in which social spaces are carved out of a densely pervasive urban capitalism to create possibilities for equity and hope. In a world that's increasingly urban, how do we make and remake societies that aren't endlessly repressive? My background in journalism informs my academic work, leading me to value the importance of story and politics and the ways in which local patterns can be read to exemplify larger significant social and economic changes. At the same time, my interest in the importance of place is also primary, and I've found that geography matters deeply in analyzing the ways that humans survive and understand their world. I'm especially interested in labor and gender and how the study of work can open up an understanding of nearly all aspects of human life.
Regional Focus: US cities, California and the West, San Francisco Bay Area

Sandra Brown
Personal Interests:
E-mail: sandybrown@berkeley.edu
BA 1995 (Politics) UC Santa Cruz
Research Interests: She's interested in researching labor and social movements in California, with a specific focus on connections with regional development, global economic integration and trade, politics, culture, race and gender.
Regional Focus:

Jennifer Casolo

 Personal Interests:
New student - Photo pending
E-mail: jjcasolo@berkeley.edu
BA 1983 (American Studies) Brandeis University
Research Interests: Gender, political ecology, development theory, Latin American indigenous cultures.
Regional Focus: Central America

Lifang Chiang

 Personal Interests:
A coastal upbringing on both sides of the Pacific has instilled her love of cities, people, ideas, travels, ocean, foghorns, night stars, sky and surf.
Websites:
E-mail: lifang@berkeley.edu
BA 1990 (Political Science) UC Berkeley, MCP 1995 (City Planning) UC Berkeley, MPH 1995 (Public Health) UC Berkeley
Research Interests: For the past decade, Lifang has been engaged in developing strategies for healthy living from a variety of geographical scales and capacities: as an urban planner (five years in San Francisco and Oakland), as a social scientist for the Federal government (four years based in Washington, D.C.), and as a community development worker in South Asia (a year in Bangladesh and Nepal). Academically, she is interested in employing wide-ranging discursive inquiries and a new critical geography towards political practices which are at once more humanistic and ecologically informed (e.g., fair trade, new urbanism, living wage campaigns). In particular, she is interested in examining emergent social and spatial relationships of production, value and exchange; and in promoting sustainable life and livelihood strategies for distressed populations-- homeless and urban migrants, women transitioning from welfare, youth offenders. Lifang has long been actively involved with the environmental justice movement in the United States and with peace and anti-militarization efforts in East Asia.
Regional Focus:

Alicia Cowart

 Personal Interests:
capoeira angola, travel, hiking/camping, dancing
Websites:
www.ficaoakland.org
www.capoeira-angola.org
E-mail: alicia@berkeley.edu
BA 2002 (Art History and Anthropology) Oglethorpe University
Research Interests: Prehistoric environmental change and how it has affected settlement and migration patterns in the Americas; geography and archaeology; and the relationship between humans and the environment over time within indigenous societies of Latin America.
Regional Focus: Latin America

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