Team Group: alum

Shannon Fiala

Shannon is currently a coastal planner with the California Coastal Commission, where she assists local governments in updating their land use plans and zoning codes to require coastal development to avoid, minimize and mitigate the risks from sea level rise while protecting coastal resources, including ecosystems, public recreation, and agriculture. Shannon has over ten years…

Continue reading

Arielle “Ari” Simmons-Steffen

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 where she used a variety…

Continue reading

Fernando Magdaleno

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 channels and floodplains, analyzing  Russian…

Continue reading

Alex Westhoff

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 climate resiliency. Holding a joint…

Continue reading

Ricardo da Cruz e Sousa

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. Ricardo started his career working…

Continue reading

Rich Walkling

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 and creek restoration. While at…

Continue reading

Julie Beagle

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 for restoration targets, and conceptual…

Continue reading

Kristen (Podolak) Wilson

Kristen (Podolak) Wilson

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 scenarios. She is currently working…

Continue reading