Alumni and affiliated scientists

Alex Westhoff, AICP, is a planner with the Marin County Community Development Agency focused on adaptation planning for communities vulnerable to sea level rise. With over thirteen years of experience in planning, monitoring and management activities for San Francisco Bay-Delta communities, his professional interests include placemaking, preservation, public participation, and Read More

Ari has years of experience working for environmental non-profits, water and wastewater utilities. He worked on Lake Merced outreach and research with the SFPUC before moving to engaging the public and soliciting their feedback for green infrastructure and flood management with the wastewater department of the SFPUC. During his time Read More

Ari currently works as a GIS Data Engineer at Tableau Software in Seattle, WA.  Her day-to-day work builds from the GIS and visualization skills that she honed while a student in LAEP. Her interest in furthering the technology that supports sound environmental decision making was highlighted in her master's thesis work Read More

Blanca’s research has focused on the effects of natural and human disturbance on benthic communities. She studied biology in Ecuador and started her journey studying rivers with Dr. Dean Jacobsen studying macroinvertebrates from Andean streams, especially aquatic snails. She attended Universitat de Barcelona for her graduate studies, where she was Read More

Chantha’s research focuses on environmental changes from water infrastructure development, land use change, and climate change on water resources of the Mekong’s Tonle Sap Lake basin. He has mainly worked on the impacts of water infrastructures development on the change in flow and water quality dynamics. He was a visiting Read More

While at UC Berkeley, Chris studied water resources management, fluvial geomorphology, and water law. Her Master’s Thesis focused on the physical and institutional challenges of managing surface water flows for both human and environmental uses in California's central coast watersheds. As the Principal of Alford Environmental, Chris provides technical support Read More

Clare Waldmann currently works as a Consultant for s.Pro – sustainable projects GmbH, a sustainable development and project management consultancy based in Berlin, Germany. She is responsible for sharing knowledge and experiences relevant for implementation of the EU Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning (2014/89/EU) with EU Member States. Additionally, she Read More

Daniela focuses on Design and Restoration of Natural Ecological Functions at the interface of human and wild space. Daniela works at John Northmore Roberts & Associates in Berkeley, CA, where they plan, design, & manage various-scale projects that integrate human uses into natural areas, and restore natural functions on urban Read More

Dr. Doug Shields is a hydraulic engineer with interests in backwater management, large wood, effects of vegetation on levee reliability, response of fluvial systems to disturbance, impacts of agriculture on water quality, and environmental design criteria for river engineering. Current work includes nutrient regulation by river backwaters, assessment of reservoir Read More

Dr. Erin Bray is an Assistant Professor in Hydrology and Fluvial Geomorphology in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences at San Francisco State University. Previously she was an Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge where she co-led the Water Science Program. Erin was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Read More

Fernando coordinates the Environmental Restoration Dep. in the Spanish Centre for Studies and Experimentation of Public Works (CEDEX), and also serves as an assistant professor in the Civil Engineering College of Madrid´s Technical University. He visited Berkeley as a Fulbright post-doc scholar, focusing on the following topics: “Hydromorphology of degraded Read More

Giyoung is a River Ecological Engineer with extensive experiences from Korea, Japan, Italy and United States in the area of ‘River / Dam Environment Management and Restoration’, specializing in (i) Assessment of Dam and Reservoir Impacts on River Channel Geomorphology and Ecological Functions, (ii) Process-based River Ecological Restoration through Integrated Read More

Visiting Scholar Hsiao-Wen Wang is an Associate Professor with Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering at National Cheng Kung University. Her research interests include river mechanics and restoration, sediment transport and management, ecohydraulics, water environment planning and assessment, and geomorphology. She is currently working on resolving the conflicts related to Read More

Ingrid is a landscape architect specializing in the design of habitat restoration, park and open space, and sustainable development projects at WRA, an environmental consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She brings a diverse background in landscape architecture, environmental planning and ecology to her work. Ingrid has Read More

Josh Pollak, AICP, is currently an environmental planner at the Bay Area Air District, where he works on long-term air quality and greenhouse gas planning, environmental compliance, and environmental review guidelines for local jurisdictions. Prior to the Air District, he worked in private consulting evaluating the impact of large-scale and Read More

Julie works as an environmental scientist in the Resilient Landscapes Program at SFEI with a focus on fluvial and tidal geomorphic processes in Bay Area streams, and wetlands, including the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. She leads the Delta Landscapes project which has created spatially explicit landscape metrics to provide a basis Read More

Kelly Janes is a water resource planner who specializes in collaborative watershed planning, including: flood risk management, coastal storm damage reduction, navigation, recreation, and river, wetland and coastal ecosystem restoration. Kelly is currently an Environmental Resource Specialist for the Portland District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working on Read More

Kelsey's research focused on urban water issues including ecological alternatives for treating brewery wastewater. Her research evaluated policy, permitting and watershed scale land use planning initiatives.  Kelsey earned her B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of Vermont and has worked in many different aspects of the Environmental Field for the Read More

Kristen works as an ecologist for The Nature Conservancy in the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. She focuses on watershed/conservation planning and monitoring the impacts of restoration projects. She uses spatially-explicit models, stakeholder-input, and cost-effectiveness in conservation planning to quantify ecosystem services and trade-offs associated with different land management and restoration Read More

Kumkum Bhattacharyya’s dissertation research at the University of Burdwan (India) on the impounded Damodar River, a subsystem of the Ganga River, whose water infrastructure was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority.  As a post-doctoral scholar in UCB’s Riverlab 2002-2003, she worked on sediment management in aging reservoirs.  Kumkum is interested Read More

Post-Doctoral Scholar Lei Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and researcher at the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation, Tianjin University, China. Her research focuses on how cities on the Yellow River floodplain adapted over centuries to frequent flooding and waterlogging, the traditional locally-developed Read More

Mark Tompkins is an engineer, scientist, and planner with over 20 years experience developing and implementing water resources and aquatic ecosystem restoration projects, with a focus on on flood management, river restoration, applied fluvial geomorphology, and aquatic ecology. Dr. Tompkins serves on interdisciplinary technical advisory committees for the San Joaquin Read More

Mia works as a Conservation Hydrologist for Trout Unlimited. Her work focuses on coastal hydrology, ecological flow thresholds, conservation planning, coho salmon and steelhead trout recovery and translating findings into recovery prioritization actions and regional polices. She specializes in using a combination of field-based data, numerical modeling and geospatial tools Read More

Nimisha’s graduate research focused on analyzing the impacts of monsoon flooding in the Mithi River watershed in Mumbai, India, and developing equitable flood mitigation techniques in high density developing nations. She believes in the integration of community outreach, public policy, planning and restoration design principles for combating the effects of Read More

Pedro completed his Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley. He now works as an urban planner and post-doc researcher at the University of Lisbon. He has studied the relationship between cities and rivers, including studies over the evolution of urban river fronts and issues of connectivity, Read More

Rafael was a visitng scholar at UC Berkeley as he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Technical University of Milan. His research focused on network-scale sediment connectivity modeling. During his period as visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Rafael developed a sediment transport model for large tributaries of the Mekong. Read More

Raymond is a hydraulic engineer based in San Francisco Bay Area, working for GHD (a professional services company focused on water, environment, energy) and the City of Mountain View on watershed management, urban flood risk reduction, river restoration, and climate change adaptation projects. His technical interests include watershed planning, hydrology, Read More

Ricardo is a professor at the Architecture and Urbanism School of the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial in Quito, Ecuador. Ricardo’s research interest lie in reducing natural disasters and improving environmental quality in Latin American cities by involving communities in restoring their ecosystems. He is a landscape architect originally from Lisbon, Portugal. Read More

Rich Walkling currently serves as an appointed member of the East Bay Regional Park District Park Advisory Committee, board chair of Urban Tilth in Richmond, vice president of the Golden Gate Audubon Society, and board member of Citizens for East Shore Parks. He graduated with a focus on watershed planning Read More

Scott founded walls land+water shortly after completing his graduate degree at UC Berkeley. He provides a broad array of services related to watershed science, planning, and design. His specialties range from hydro/geomorphological data collection and analysis, multi-benefit restoration design, advance remote sensing and GIS, to using drones to collect high-resolution Read More