Pedro Vasconcelos
Pedro Vasconcelos is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment at UT Austin. He has a master’s degree in Forestry Sciences from the University of Brasilia. He is interested in examining and evaluating the intricate links between human activities and landscapes, specifically addressing land use change, agricultural frontier expansion, and deforestation. Pedro employs remote sensing, GIS, and statistical techniques to analyze the dynamic processes of land transformation, with a specific emphasis on Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado biomes.
Sewon Ohr
Sewon Ohr is a PhD student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He has focused on community ecology in terms of understanding the structure of vegetation communities and the relationship with environmental factors. Currently, his research interest is linking the reciprocal relationship between vegetation communities and the environment with the impact of disturbances. Currently, he focuses on the impact of hurricanes and the following landslide on the ecosystem in the Caribbean regions.
Katiana Garcia Rosado
Katiana Garcia Rosado is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a master’s degree in Ecosystem Science from Colorado State University. Her research interests include how hydrological, geomorphological, and ecological processes influence stream dynamics and water resource management. Currently, her research examines how watershed dynamics and river discharges impact coastal water quality in Puerto Rico.
Erika Dodge
Erika Dodge is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment studying the impact of spatiotemporal variability in model algorithms when estimating ungulate populations and animal habitat-interactions in the Kalahari region of Botswana. She holds a Master of Science in conservation ecology from the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor. Erika uses GIS, remote sensing, and AI/ML to analyze community and population-level ecosystem dynamics.
Keivan Tavakoli
Keivan Tavakoli is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment whose research examines flood hazards and the geomorphological evolution of rivers. He combines physics-based numerical models with stochastic methods, remote sensing, and scientific machine learning (SciML) to diagnose the processes that generate floods and drive channel change. His projects evaluate how extreme flows, sediment transport, and human interventions interact to alter river form and flood risk. By fusing observations with SciML-augmented, process-based models, he aims to advance the prediction, mapping, and mitigation of flood hazards.
Francis Russell
Francis Russell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. They have a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and a Master of Art from the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. Their expertise is in remote sensing and geospatial analysis for evaluating human-environment relationships and political ecology in Latin America, particularly focused on ecological resistance to climate change and methods of empowering rural and marginalized communities.
Immaculate Irumba
Immaculate is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a Master of Science in Environmental and Natural Resource Management and a BA in Tourism, both from Makerere University, Uganda. Her research interests are in environmental issues and analyzing unique conservation efforts for a sustainable ecosystem. Immaculate’s research studies the in-situ and ex-situ conservation of African Grey Parrots, Chimpanzees, and other primates, as well as the utilization of these Natural Resources through Community-Based Tourism practices to sustain livelihoods in tropical forests with a lower protection area status in Western Uganda, East Africa.
Dalia Vasquez
Dalia Vazquez is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. Her research focuses on community water governance in Puebla, Mexico, with particular attention to the volcanic regions of El Pico de Orizaba and El Popocatépetl. She explores the socio-political and physical dimensions of water scarcity and extractivism.
Faculty Advisors
Carlos Ramos-Scharrón
Carlos Ramos-Scharrón joined the faculty of LLILAS and the Department of Geography and the Environment in 2013. His areas of research include watershed sciences and applied hydrology and geomorphology, with an emphasis on the Insular Caribbean and Latin America. His work has a strong environmental component, addressing how human modification of landscapes for the purposes of urbanization, agricultural production, or recreation affects their hydrology, resulting in accelerated soil erosion, degraded water quality, and impoverished habitats such as coral reefs.
Eugenio Arima
Dr. Arima is a human-environmental geographer interested in understanding the motivations that drive humans to act upon and transform tropical landscapes and how that manifests spatially in terms of patterns. His work typically employs mixed-methods such as interview-based fieldwork, computer simulation, econometrics and spatial statistics, geographic information systems, and remote sensing. He is associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment and teaches undergraduate GIS, graduate level seminars in Land Change Science, Regression Analysis, and Modeling.
ESHI Alumni
Audrey Denvir
Audrey Denvir recieved her PhD from UT Austin’s Department of Geography and the Environment in 2023. Her research evaluated how global markets affect land use and the impact of land use change and deforestation on ecosystem services in forested landscapes, focusing on how the expansion of avocado production in Mexico impacts the forests and communities in Michoacán. She currently holds a position at the World Resources Institute as a Research Associate.
Sisimac Duchicela
Sisimac Duchicela receieved her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. Her work has focused on the ecology, plant taxonomy and conservation of high mountain ecosystems, specifically of Andean forests, páramos, and punas (tropical alpine ecosystems). She specializes in the potential effects of climate change on high-elevation vegetation and the implications this will have on the ecosystem as a whole. Currently, she holds an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sara Eshleman
Sara Eshleman recieved her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and the Environment in 2024. Her research focused on the long-lasting impacts of humans on environments; examining the lasting impact of the ancient Maya in Belize. She used airborne lidar imagery and directed field work to evaluate how composition and structure vary with past human presence and activities. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter in the Archaeology and History Department.
Siri Knudsen
Siri Knudsen recieved her Master of Arts from the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin in 2022. Her research cenetered on human-environment interactions and sustainable development in the Central America and Southern Mexico region with an emphasis on alternative methods of development such as grassroots initiatives and NGO projects. She is currently a Sustainability Manager for SSA Marine.
Alex Marden
Alex Marden recieved his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. His research focused on the interactions among fire, ecosystems, and humans and how field data paired with remote sensing can help understand these interactions in Botswana. He is currently the GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator for UT Austin Libraries.
Bailey Ohlson
Bailey Ohlson recieved her Master of Art from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. She specializes in analyzing fluvial geomorphology, sedimentation rates, and watershed analysis using geospatial and remote sensing to understand how changes in sediment impact water resources. She is currently a Product Engineer II at Esri.
Molly H. Polk
Molly H. Polk, PhD is the Associate Director of Sustainability Studies and a Lecturer in the Department of Geography and The Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. Molly specializes in land change science in the tropical mountains of Latin America. Related themes of research and teaching include climate change, social-ecological system theory, landscape ecology, land change science, and sustainability.
Kenneth Young
Kenneth Young does policy-relevant research that informs biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. He does this by linking biogeography and landscape ecology to questions of ecosystem dynamics and aspects of global environmental and socioeconomic change. He has worked in natural and utilized landscapes in tropical areas and aspires to understand the global tropics, especially as affected by humans. He studies protected areas in relation to conservation biology, to climate change, and to land use. Most recently he has been splitting his research efforts between Andean landscapes and the tropical forests and floodplains of the western Amazon. He is professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment; he teaches classes such as Anthropocene, Biogeography, Climate Change, Landscape Ecology, and Seminar in Biodiversity Conservation.
Anaïs Zimmer
Anaïs Zimmer recieved her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. Her research interests lie in the processes and implications of global change within mountain environments, with a specific focus on proglacial landscapes. Her dissertation studied how physical, ecological, and social processes interact to drive ecosystem changes in alpine proglacial landscapes and how these inform the best adaptation strategies. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development.
Elías Cisneros
Dr. Elías Cisneros is an environmental economist interested in the political economy of environmental degradation and human health. He combines spatial data on biophysical conditions with exogenous market and political shocks to investigate human behavior and the transformation of landscapes. Remotely sensed high-resolution and high-frequency data on forest losses, fires, as well as geo-coded policies and social media data allow him to explore the dynamic processes of the economy and policy. He is a visiting researcher and a EU Marie-Sklodowska Curie fellow at the Department of Geography and the Environment working on the project PlanetHealth.
