Courtesy Faculty

Ford Ballantyne

• Ph.D., University of New Mexico (2003)
• Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Interests: repeated patterns we see in nature, changes in abundance, community structure and ecosystem function across space and through time, mean-variance scaling of population abundance, the relationship between trophic structure and biomass flow in community food webs and regulation of nutrient dynamics and stoichiometry in ecosystems.
• Email: fb4@ku.edu
• Office: 154 Higuchi Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-1868

Sharon Billings

• Ph.D., Duke University (1998)
• Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Interests: global environmental change effects on ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycling, how soil and plant processes such as decomposition and nutrient uptake may be altered in a future climate, and how those alterations can affect ecosystem productivity and subsequent fluxes of important biogeochemical constituents.
• Email: sharonb@ku.edu
• Office: 157 Higuchi Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-1560

Nathaniel Brunsell

• Ph.D., Utah State Univ. (2003)
• Assistant Professor of Geography
• Interests: face energy balance, turbulence measurements using large aperture scintillometry and eddy covariance, ecological consequences of regional climate change, surface-precipitation feedbacks, application of non-linear time series analysis to meteorological datasets.
• Email: brunsell@ku.edu
• Office: 417 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-2021

So-Min Cheong

• Ph.D., Washington (2001)
• Assistant Professor of Geography
• Interests: the human dimensions of environmental change; vulnerability and adaptation; innovation and regulation in green technology.
• Email: somin@ku.edu
• Office: 221 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-1836

Oswald Chong

• Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin (2005))
• Assistant Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
• Interests: sustainable design and project planning, eco-efficiency, technical metabolism, energy efficiency, sustainable information, socio-economics of eco-efficientcommunities, corporate-society sustainability interface, life cycle performance, and social and human dimensions./li>
• Email: oswald@ku.edu
• Office: 2134-C Learned
• Phone: (785) 864-2891

Shannon Criss

• M.Arch., Harvard (1992)
• Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning
• Interests: how we make buildings and communities, develop processes and strategies to enable an entity (whether an individual or institutional client, a neighborhood, or a community) to build for itself what it could not do on its own.
• Email: scriss@ku.edu
• Office: 102 Marvin
• Phone: (785) 864-3861

Greg Cushman

• Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin (2003)
• Assistant Professor of History
• Interests: Environmental history (esp. climate, disasters, oceans); Latin America since 1750 (esp. Andes and Cuba); history of science and technology (esp. meteorology, oceanography, ecology, transportation, agriculture), global history.
• Email: gcushman@ku.edu
• Office: 3631 Wescoe
• Phone: (785) 864-9449

John Devlin

• Ph.D., University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (1994)
• Associate Professor of Geology
• Interests: Hydrogeology, environmental organic chemistry, in-situ groundwater remediation - particularly bioremediation and permeable reactive barriers, pollutant reactions with granular iron.
• Email: jfdevlin@ku.edu
• Office: 102 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-4994

Stephen Egbert

• Ph.D., Kansas (1994)
• Associate Professor of Geography
• Interests: Use of time-series satellite imagery to characterize and monitor land use and land cover. Evaluation of geospatial technologies for mapping and maintaining minefield databases. Geographic aspects of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes against humanity.
• Email: segbert@ku.edu
• Office: 217C Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-4252

Don Haider-Markel

• Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1997)
• Professor, Political Science
• Interests: Public policy, political institutions, public opinion.
• Email: dhmarkel@ku.edu
• Office: 405 Blake Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-9034

Jie Han

• Ph.D., Georgia Tech (1997)
• Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering
• Interests: Geosynthetics, earth-retaining structures, ground improvement, pile foundations, pavement design
• Email: jiehan@ku.edu
• Office: 2143 Learned Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-3714

Saralyn Reece Hardy

• M.A., University of Kansas (1994)
• Director, Spencer Art Museum
• Email: srh@ku.edu
• Phone: (785) 864-4710

Peter H. Herlihy

• Ph.D., - Louisiana State University (1986)
• Associate Professor, Geography
• Interests: Tropical rain forest peoples in Latin America, cultural and political ecology with participatory research mapping methodologies for nature conservation and indigenous land rights, and situating indigenous peoples within a globalizing Latin America.
• Email: herlihy@ku.edu
• Office: 202 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-4292

Daniel Hirmas

• Ph.D., - UC Riverside (2008)
• Assistant Professor, Geography
• Interests: arid zone soils, specifically, genesis and biogeochemical cycling of soils in desert mountains, quantitatively describing soil morphology, relating these variables to landscape processes, and applying numerical models to study pedological phenomena.
• Email: hirmas@ku.edu
• Office: 415A Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-5542

 

Dennis Lane

• Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana, Civil Engineering, (1976)
• N.T. Veatch Distinguished Professor, Environmental Engineering
• Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Interests in Air pollution, Aerosol science, Acid rain, Pesticide runoff from agricultural lands, Characteristics and Environmental impacts of atmospheric deposition
• Email: lane@ukans.edu
• Office: 4007 Learned Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-3731

 

Xingong Li

• Ph.D., South Carolina (2000)
• Assistant Professor, Geography
• Interests: geographic information management, visualization, analysis, developing computational methods and tools for hydrological modeling and water resources management.
• Email: lixi@ku.edu
• Office: 409 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-5545

David Mechem

• Ph.D., University of Washington (2003)
• Assistant Professor, Atmospheric Science
• Interests: different manifestations of precipitating convection, ranging from drizzling boundary layer stratocumulus to deep, highly organized mesoscale convective systems; cloud system processes
• Email: dmechem@ku.edu
• Office: 117 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-5707

Garth Myers

• Ph.D., UCLA (1993)
• Associate Professor, Geography
• Chair of the Cultural Geography Specialty Group of the AAG.
• Interests: Sub-Saharan Africa, Development, Cultural and Political Geography
• Email: gmyers@ku.edu
• Office: 201 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-4291

A. Townsend Peterson

• Ph.D., University of Chicago (1990)
• Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; Courtesy Professor, Geography
• Interests: geography of biodiversity, tropical ornithology with a particular focus on systematics, conservation biology and planning, invasive species biology, and disease transmission systems
• Email: town@ku.edu
• Office: 713B Dyche
• Phone: (785) 864-3926

Simran Sethi

• M.B.A., Presidio School of Management (2005)
• Professional-in-Residence, School of Journalism
• Interests: energy policy, life cycle analysis, global environmental justice efforts and grassroots activism.
• Email: simran@ku.edu
• Office: 2071 Dole
• Phone: (785) 864-8021

Jorge Soberon

• Ph.D., Imperial College, University of London, UK (1982)
• Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
• Interests: documenting and understanding large-scale spatial patterns in the biodiversity of terrestrial species.
• Email: tjsoberon@ku.edu
• Office: 713B Dyche
• Phone: (785) 864-3897

Marjorie Swann

• Ph.D., Oxford, UK (1990)
• Associate Professor, English
• Acting Director, Museum Studies
• Interests: Renaissance material culture, history of the visual arts and art collecting in Kansas and the Great Plains.
• Email: mswann@ku.edu
• Office: 2033 Wescoe
• Phone: (785) 864-2570

William Tsutsui

• Ph.D., Princeton (1995)
• Professor, History
• Associate Dean, International Studies, CLAS
• Interests: modern Japan, business and economic history, environmental history, Japanese popular culture, World War II, U.S.-Japanese relations.
• Email: btsutsui@ku.edu
• Office: 3606 Wescoe
• Phone: (785) 864-3661 / 864-9435

Cornelis J. Vanderveen

• Ph.D., University of Utrecht, the Netherlands (1986)
• Associate Professor, Geography
• Interests: dynamics of tidewater glaciers and iceberg calving, Greenland outlet glaciers: history and dynamics since the Little Ice Age, remote sensing applications for glacial geomorphology, sustainability and Earth's resources: the role of population growth.
• Email: cjvdv@ku.edu
• Office: 203 Lindley
• Phone: (785) 864-7725

Joy Ward

• Ph.D., Duke (1997)
• Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
• Interests: effects of elevated carbon dioxide on plant growth and development, functional genomics of plant responses to global change factors, scaling up evolutionary responses to elevated carbon dioxide, impact of low carbon dioxide and climate on plants during the last ice age, climate reconstruction from tree rings dating to the Holocene and last ice age, paleoecology of the Rancho La Brea tar pits in southern California, climate change effects on the genders of dioecious species
• Email: joyward@ku.edu
• Office: 8026 Haworth
• Phone: (785) 864-5218

Donald Worster

• Ph.D., Yale (1971)
• Distinguished Professor, History
• Interests: environmental history of North America and the world; U.S. West; U.S. cultural and social history.
• Email: dworster@ku.edu
• Office: 3608 Wescoe Hall
• Phone: (785) 864-9474