Paul Bunje
Executive Director of UCLA Center for Climate Change Solutions

Paul is the Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Climate Change Solutions, where he works to bridge the gap between research science and decision makers to help society respond and adapt to the challenges of climate change. Until August 2008, Paul was an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he designed and evaluated policy on climate change and ecosystem services. Paul is trained as an evolutionary biologist, having performed research into the genomic and population mechanisms producing species diversity. Paul's scientific research and policy work have been conducted throughout the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific.


Ann Carlson
Faculty Director of Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment

Ann Carlson is Professor of Law and the inaugural Faculty Director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law. She is also on the faculty of the UCLA Institute of the Environment. Professor Carlson's scholarship in environmental law focuses on climate change law and policy, federalism and the role social norms play in affecting environmentally cooperative behavior. Her recent work involves analyzing unusual models of environmental federalism, with a focus on the unique role California plays in regulating mobile source emissions, including greenhouse gas emissions, under the Clean Air Act. She has also written on the legal and political obstacles utilities will face in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and on the threat of heat waves and climate change. She is a frequent commentator and speaker on environmental issues, particularly on climate change. Professor Carlson’s article Takings on the Ground was selected in 2003 by the Land Use and Environmental Law Review as one of the top ten environmental articles of the year. She is co-author (with Daniel Farber and Jody Freeman) of Environmental Law (7th Ed.). Professor Carlson teaches Property, Environmental Law and Climate Change Law and Policy and was the recipient of the 2006 Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching. She served as the law school’s academic associate dean from 2004-2006. Carlson received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1989 and her B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1982.

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Charles Corbett
Director of UCLA Leaders in Sustainability

Charles is professor of Operations Management and Environmental Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he received among other recognitions the Citibank Teaching Award in 2008, and served as associate dean of the MBA program from 2003 to 2006. Professor Corbett's research and teaching focus on the interfaces between operations management, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. His environmental work revolves around examining links between good business practices and environmental protection. This has included studying the effects and global diffusion of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 and of the LEED green building standards; the way in which supply contracts are changed from volume-based to service-based to align incentives between suppliers and buyers; the environmental footprint of a project-based industry such as the motion picture and television industry; and adoption of energy-efficiency practices in small and medium-sized businesses. His research in entrepreneurship focuses on how for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurs and small business owners make decisions and run their organizations on a day-to-day basis. His earlier work has focused mostly on how contracts can help improve coordination between buyers and suppliers, whether related to inventory control, service contracts or project management.

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Vijay K. Dhir
Dean of UCLA Henry Sameuli School of Engineering and Applied Science

As dean of the Engineering School since 2003, Vijay Dhir has worked to make UCLA Engineering a hub for interdisciplinary research. In recent years, the School has won seven competitive research centers from the federal government and private industry that will bring more than $100 million dollars to Southern California to spur research and development on emerging technologies.

In 2006, Dhir was elected to the National Academy of Engineering – among the highest honors awarded to engineers – for his work in boiling heat transfer and nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics and safety. Dhir received the 2004 Max Jakob Memorial Award, the first person from UCLA to receive the award since L. M. K. Boelter, the founding dean of the School. He is a fellow of ASME and the American Nuclear Society. In 2004, he was selected as an inductee into the University of Kentucky’s Engineering Hall of Distinction. He has also received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Memorial Award in the Science category and the Donald Q. Kern award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

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Cara Horowitz
Executive Director of Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment

Cara Horowitz is the first Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Executive Director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment, which is dedicated to studying and advancing law and policy solutions to the climate change crisis and training the next generation of leaders in creating these solutions.  The Emmett Center was established alongside, and as a complement to, the UCLA Environmental Law Center, home of the well-established Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic and the Evan Frankel Environmental Law and Policy Program. 
Prior to joining the faculty, she worked on oceans and wildlife issues as a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she litigated high-profile cases and advocated domestically and internationally for answers to complex environmental challenges.  She has also worked at Caldwell, Leslie and Proctor, a litigation boutique, and served as law clerk to Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  Horowitz is a 2001 graduate of the UCLA School of Law, where she was an Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review and ranked first in her class.

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Diana Huffaker
PI/Director of Clean Energy for Green Industry at UCLA

Professor Diana Huffaker received her B.S. degree in Engineering Physics (1986) from the University of Arizona, and her M.S. degree in Material Sciecnes (1990) from the University of Texas, Austin. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1994 from the same university following her work on vertical cavity devices based on buried native-oxide layers. During 2001-2006, she was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Her research interests cover nanodot-based optoelectronic devices including III-V/Si photonics, lasers, single-photon emitters, III-V nanotransistors, solar cells and electronic characterization of biomaterials. Her current research projects focus on device development, crystal growth (MBE and MOCVD) and characterization of patterned and self-assembled quantum dots in compound III-(As, P, N, Sb), modeling of self-assembled processes along with electronic characterization of biomaterials.

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Richard Joseph Jackson (Dick Jackson)
Chair of Environmental Health Sciences

Richard J. Jackson has done extensive work in the impact of the environment on health, particularly relating to children. Dr. Jackson chaired the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Environmental Health. He did extensive work on pesticides in California, and has also focused on epidemiology, infectious diseases and toxicology. Over the past decade much of his work has focused on how the 'built environment' including how architecture and urban planning affect health. He recently served on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects and has written and spoken extensively in the above areas. Currently, Dr. Jackson working on policy analyses of environmental impacts on health ranging from toxicology, chemical body burdens, terrorism, sustainability, climate change, urban design and architecture. In addition, he is developing policy analyses in related areas, such as how farm, education, housing, and transportation policies affect health.

His work led to the establishment of the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program and state and national laws which helped reduce risk from dangerous pesticides, especially for farm workers and children. He served in the highest California Public Health position where he advanced the states disease preparedness efforts and public health effort to reverse the obesity epidemic. He was instrumental in the re-creation of the California Department of Public Health, separated from the insurance functions from the former Department of Health Services. He served 15 years at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention where he established the National Asthma Epidemiology and Control Program and advanced the childhood lead poisoning prevention program. He instituted the current federal effort to “biomonitor” chemical levels in the US population.

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Nurit Katz
UCLA Sustainability Coordinator

UCLA's first Sustainability Coordinator, Nurit Katz is working to foster partnerships among academic, research, and operational departments and further the goals and initiatives of the campus sustainability program. Before starting in this position she founded the UCLA Sustainable Resource Center in 2005 to provide resources for the community on sustainability. She then served as President of the Graduate Students Association and helped Dr. Charles Corbett to develop a new interdisciplinary graduate certificate program - Leaders in Sustainability. After graduation she helped launch the UCLA Center for Corporate Environmental Performance. She has worked on a variety of sustainability projects including a project for the City of Los Angeles that focused on transit-oriented development along the Expo Light Rail Line. Her essay on the topic was published in the UCLA Anderson Forecast's "Solutions for Our City". Nurit holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a Masters in Public Policy from the UCLA School of Public Affairs. She is Chapter Leader of the Los Angeles Professional Chapter of Net Impact, a global network of leaders changing the world through business.

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Glen MacDonald
Director of UCLA Institute of the Environment

Glen MacDonald is the director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and interim director of the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science. He studies climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and societies. In his research he has reconstructed past climate change and impacts through the use of fossil pollen, fossil stomates, plant macrofossils, insect remains, tree-rings, geochemistry and historical records. Additionally, he works on issues of current and future environmental change with a focus on water scarcity. Areas of active field research include California, the northern Great Plains and adjacent Rocky Mountains, the North American subarctic, Russia and Siberia.

Stephanie Pincetl
Researcher and Director of the Center on People and the Environment
Dr. Pincetl, Director of the Center on People and the Environment, has a PhD from UCLA’s former Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is a Researcher at the Institute of the Environment at UCLA and a Social Science Researcher at the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station. She has published extensively on issues of environmental policies and regulation.
The content of her research is land use, land use change, with a focus on urban environments and the transformation of their natural environments. The theoretical core of her research is environmental politics, policies and governance and specifically, the ways that rules and rulemaking impact the participants in decision-making and the content of decisions. Rules can be formal or informal, hard or soft, but they form the boundaries of what is perceived of as possible. Dr. Pincetl has studied land use, infrastructure, and environmental preservation or services. Dr. Pincetl teaches courses on land use and the environment, environmental policies and politics in the US, and sustainable cities. She also teaches in Europe, including the Institut d’Etudes Politiques International Masters of Public Administration in Paris, and has on-going research collaborations with European collaborators.

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Linda Rosenstock
Dean of UCLA School of Public Health

Dr. Linda Rosenstock is Dean of UCLA’s School of Public Health, one of the United States’ top ranked schools. She is Professor of Medicine and Environmental Health Sciences and a recognized authority in occupational and environmental health and broad areas of public health and science policy.

Before coming to UCLA in 2000, Dr. Rosenstock was Director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for nearly seven years.  As Director of NIOSH, Rosenstock led the only federal agency with a mandate to undertake research and prevention activities in occupational safety and health. In recognition of her efforts, Rosenstock received the Presidential Distinguished Executive Rank Award, the highest executive service award in the government.

Rosenstock received her M.D. and M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University.  She conducted advanced training at the University of Washington, where she was Chief Resident in Internal Medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

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Joseph Rudnick
Dean of UCLA Department of Physical Sciences

Joseph Rudnick is the dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and served as the chair of the Department of Physics from1986 to 1989 and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 2004 to 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from University of California, San Diego. Dr. Rudnick has lectured internationally and has held appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of Washington; Tel Aviv University; Case Western Reserve University; Tufts University; and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rudnick is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and has interests in the general field of statistical mechanics. His recent research has ranged from the purely physical – critical phenomena and exotic forms of magnetism – to the interface with biology in studies of the structure of viruses and the mechanical properties of DNA.

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Mike Swords
Executive Director of Strategic Research Initiatives, Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research

Michael Swords currently serves as the Executive Director of Strategic Research Initiatives at UCLA where he is responsible for developing large, multi-disciplinary research centers and institutes, and for developing partnerships with government agencies, foundations, industry and non-profits.

Swords is one of UCLA's designated representatives to Clean Tech Los Angeles (CTLA) which is a multi-institutional collaboration between UCLA, USC, Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Mayor's Office of Economic Development, Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRALA), Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Los Angeles Business Council (LABC) and the Los Angeles Economic Development Council (LAEDC) to establish Los Angeles as the global leader in research, commercialization, and deployment of clean technologies. He graduated from UCLA Anderson School of Management's Executive Education certificate program in December of 2008.

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Paul Weiss
Director of California NanoSystem Institute (CNSI)

Weiss became the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute in 2009. Currently, he is also a professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, and the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences. Before coming to UCLA, he was a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he began his academic career as an assistant professor in 1989.

Weiss leads an interdisciplinary research group which includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, electrical and mechanical engineers, and computer scientists. Their work focuses on the atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical and electronic properties of surfaces and supramolecular assemblies. He and his students have developed new techniques to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopies. They have applied these and other tools to the study of catalysis, self- and directed assembly, physical models of biological systems, and molecular and nano-scale electronics. They work to advance nanofabrication down to ever smaller scales and greater chemical specificity in order to connect, to operate, and to test molecular devices.

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