Environmental Change Initiative Distinguished
Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Associates
Three new interdisciplinary postdoctoral research associates are joining the Environmental Change Initiative this fall. Each has developed an original project building on the expertise of current Brown faculty members from different departments. The postdocs will share an office on the first floor of MacMillan Hall while working closely with partners from across campus.
James R. Hull will join ECI and the Population Studies and Training Center. He will work with sociologist Leah VanWey and Crystal Linkletter from Community Health and S4 to examine how the transition from a barter economy to a cash economy influences social networks, agricultural intensification, and labor mobility. Jim is completing his doctorate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a predoctoral trainee at the Carolina Population Center.
Véronique St. Louis joins ECI as an interdisciplinary postdoctoral scientist, working with Dov Sax (EEB/CES) and Jack Mustard (Geological Sciences/CES)on a project that combines niche modeling and remote sensing to forecast extinctions from climate change. . Her research lies at the intersection of landscape ecology, remote sensing, and statistics. Understanding the factors that limit the spatial distribution of species across a range of spatial scales and ecosystem types has always been at the center of her work. Her research at Brown is focused on the response of plant species to future changes in climatic conditions in the Eastern US. Specifically, Véronique is interested in understanding how ecological as well as human-induced factors (e.g., land use and land cover change) will interact to affect a given species’ ability to cope with future changes in climatic conditions, and how these factors will affect the species’ risk of extinction. She received her Ph.D. Forest Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 as well as an MS in Biometry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2009 and an
MS in Biological Sciences from Université de Montréal in 2000.
Sheila Walsh earned her PhD at the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Center for Environmental Economics at the University of California-San Diego. Working with Heather Leslie (EEB/CES) and Sriniketh Nagavarapu (Economics/CES) her project will evaluate the effect of a Mexican government conditional cash transfer program in on community welfare and marine ecosystem health under different ecosystem and market conditions.