BIE Faculty Interdisciplinary Roundtables & Working Groups

BIE’s mission is to advance a broader understanding of how anthropogenic interventions, systems, and institutions challenge and/or compromise climate stability, economic and environmental sustainability, ecosystem integrity, and human health. As a key strategy to meet this mission, BIE supports original, multi-disciplinary collaborative research teams through the BIE Faculty Interdisciplinary Roundtable Program. In its third year, BIE has funded four Roundtables, at least one in each of BIE’s 3 core research themes, for one academic year.

The Roundtable is conceived as a mechanism for the recruitment and development of new interdisciplinary research projects under the institutional guidance of BIE. The Roundtable will consist of a mini-grant of up to $20,000 that will provide seed funding to a faculty team wishing to jointly explore a novel environmental research theme or a portfolio of research projects that will over time develop into full research proposal for external funding. BIE envisions the faculty research teams or clusters to consist of three or more researchers from different academic disciplines.

Governance and the California Delta
Rick Frank (lead faculty), Holly Doremus, Cymie Payne, Dan Farber

Improved Stoves to fight illness, poverty, environmental degradation, and global warming
David Levine (lead faculty), Kirk Smith, Ashok Gadgil, George Shanthikumar, Dan Kammen

Developing carbon, energy, and environmental services budgets for management strategies in multifuncional rangeland production systems
James Bartolome (lead faculty), Lynn Hutsinger William Stewart, Nathan Sayre, John Battles, Peter Berck, John Battles

Policy Architectures for Green Innovation and Justice
David Winickoff (lead faculty), Jason Corburn, Isha Ray, Louse Fortmann, Allen Goldstein, Cori Hayden, Alastair Iles, Carolyn Merchant, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Charis Thomson

2007 Roundtable recipients:

• Designing and choosing new transportation fuels
• Selecting climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies in large technical systems
• Responding to challenges presented by natural disasters
• Incorporating the value of ecosystem services into public policy
• Assessing the environmental implications of nanotechnology
• Incorporating local knowledge and cultural values into environmental practices
• Understanding and improving interaction between climate change scientists and policymakers