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PROFESSOR ELENA BERG

Professor Elena Berg is the Director of the Joy and Edward Frieman Environmental Science Center and the Chair of the Advisory Board on Environmental Sustainability. She is a broadly trained evolutionary biologist interested in multidisciplinary questions about how behavior, morphology, life history and genetics vary across different environments and spatial scales. She is also a certified water sommelier and conducts research on mineral water taste preferences and the environmental impact of the bottled water industry. Professor Berg holds a master’s degree in biological anthropology from Cambridge University and a PhD in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles; Portland State University; Harvard University; and Uppsala University, she joined AUP’s Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Environmental Science in 2014.

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PROFESSOR MANUEL CABALLER GUTIERREZ

Professor Manuel Caballer Gutierrez is a marine biologist who specializes in marine biodiversity exploration and molluscan taxonomy and systematics. He focuses on finding new strategies for cataloguing life on Earth and on identifying how physical barriers affect speciation in marine environments. He has been collecting and cataloguing marine fauna in collaboration with institutions such as the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (Venezuela). He received his PhD from the University of Cantabria in Spain and worked as a Collections Manager at the MNHN in Paris before joining the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Environmental Science in August 2019.

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PROFESSOR CLAUDIO PIANI

Professor Claudio Piani is collaborating with Professor Berg on a long-term study of climate change impacts on seed beetles. Professor Piani is a physicist and climatologist whose work defines the field of climate model bias correction. His research contributes to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He earned his PhD at the University of Washington, Seattle, funded by a comprehensive four-year Fulbright scholarship, and conducted postdoctoral research at Oxford University and the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, before joining the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Environmental Science in 2012. He currently serves as AUP’s Dean of Institutional Research, Assessment and Effectiveness.

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SOPHIE BRICOUT

Sophie Bricout is the Center’s lab technician. She maintains the beetle lab, helps set up experiments and aids in data collection.