RESEARCH EXPERTISE The Bren faculty is a collection of distinct and distinguished individuals who often collaborate to understand and solve complex environmental problems. As leaders within their disciplines, faculty members are also intimately familiar with the inherently interdisciplinary nature of environmental challenges, and most are also affiliated with other departments at UC Santa Barbara. Many Bren faculty divide their research efforts between focused work within a discipline and application-oriented projects related to environmental management and policy. Here are just a few examples of recent and ongoing collaborations:
Please see the faculty research page for more information about the research expertise, projects, and publications of individual faculty members.
AREAS OF RESEARCH FOCUS Bren research is facilitated further by collaborative efforts in several areas of specific focus, each of which is reflected in some combination of research, seminars, workshops, conferences, short courses, visiting-scholar programs, postdoctoral appointments, institutional partnerships, and special events. Each is an important and interesting intellectual area in which the Bren School has or is developing international visibility and that provides students with support and resources for projects related to it. It is important to note that the these areas of focus are inclusive rather than exclusive, and that every element of a specific focus is available to all PhD students regardless of whether their research fits precisely within the focus area or is, instead, related to it, either in part or at certain points along the arc of a student’s individual research. Further, faculty who are associated with one area of focus often collaborate with one or more colleagues in other areas and in other UCSB departments to advise students whose work may entail more than one area of focus. The interdisciplinary perspective embedded in the Bren School ensures that while areas of focus provide intellectual homes for coherent PhD programs in certain disciplines and fields, every resource available within them is available to every student regardless of the direction or scope of his or her research. The five research areas of particular focus that have been established to date are:
Corporate Environmental Management (CEM)
Corporate Environmental Management (CEM) is a broad and evolving field encompassing a range of practices related to conducting business in an environmentally responsible way. CEM research often involves several overlapping fields and requires strong interdisciplinary collaboration. Bren School faculty, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers work on a range of projects in CEM. CEM research may examine business strategies in the context of environmental rules, regulations, and agreements; institutional perspectives on the diffusion of management standards; or the effectiveness of customer pressure in greening the supply chain. Another area of focs is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the rapidly emerging field whose practitioners seek to assess and mitigate the environmental impact of products and services throughout their life cycles, from resource extraction through useful life and end-of-life management. Bren professors are also leaders in the five-year, $20 million Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, funded by NSF and EPA. The collaborative interdisciplinary venture will provide critical new information for the burgeoning nanotech industry. Business and economics are closely related, and the two fields are linked at Bren through research on the private provision of public goods, which has implications not only for consumer theory and business practices, but also for the development of market-based methods for providing environmental and natural resource benefits. Research on consumer and producer choices in green markets, and on business incentives to invest in environmental goods and services, furthers the CEM-economics link.
Environmental Economics (EE) Managing environmental problems involves tradeoffs; determining how to make those tradeoffs is at the core of EE, which highlights Bren School economists’ activities integrating economics, natural science, management, and policy to produce more relevant research outputs. EE focuses on interactions between the environment and the economy. No other environmental school has such a strong capability in this area of inquiry, which is central to environmental management. Additionally, the Bren School’s non-economics faculty provide students with a unique ability to broaden their perspective and strengthen their education in EE. EE also runs a funded speaker series that brings experts to Bren Hall for presentations to the Bren academic community and interactions with students and faculty. EE research questions tend to be concerned with such issues as how firms and individuals behave when faced with conflicting objectives, how incomplete and biased information distorts decisions, how market institutions can be designed to pursue environmental objectives, and how best to address environmental and resource issues associated with the tragedy of the commons.
Governance for Sustainable Development (GSD) Governance involves creating mechanisms and/or systems – including clusters of rights, rules, laws, norms, and principles – to resolve or alleviate social conflicts, address collective-action problems, and coordinate the actions of individuals within society. From a technical and material point of view, more often than not, we know what is needed to solve fundamental problems that are related to human-environment relations and range from poverty and land degradation to the loss of biodiversity and climate change. But we fall short in creating and implementing governance systems or regimes that motivate key players to alter their behavior in desirable ways. GSD is an umbrella for activities that include researching governance as it relates to sustainable development. Those in this area apply knowledge to address specific problems, organize and host conferences and workshops, and engage in training sessions and capacity building. GSD partners with institutions, organizations, and others to further this work.
Ecological Sustainability (ES) Traditionally, ecologists have studied “natural” ecosystems in the absence of human-induced effects. But in this era of human-dominated landscapes, the dynamics of plant and animal populations, communities, and ecosystems are inextricably linked to human society. The ES focus reflects the need for new kinds of research that address the more complex ecological problems arising out of such "coupled" systems. It is research based on collaboration among ecologists, other natural scientists, and social scientists both in and beyond the Bren School. The goal of such efforts is to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the social-economic-ecological complex that prevails in human-dominated landscapes. Activities within ES differ from those of traditional resource ecologists – fisheries biologists, foresters, etc. – in that they emanate from a systems perspective, explicitly addressing multiple scales and levels of biosocial organization. Areas of study within the area of focus include extinction risks and biological invasions, the effects of pollutants on living systems, the effects of grazing and fire regimes on ecological communities, fisheries management, and the restoration of degraded systems. Thos working in ES at Bren promote collaborations among sub-disciplines within ecology as well as with the related disciplines of economics, governance, water resources, and law.
Sustainable Management of Water Resources (SMWR) Resolving the many environmental problems associated with water requires new information and new levels of understanding – new science – which, in turn, requires new field techniques, new modeling tools, and new kinds of scientists. These water specialists may study surface or subsurface hydrology, or the interaction of the two. They may work at the interface of hydrology and other sciences. Or they may employ advances in remote sensing and computing to examine the large-scale role of water in regional- and global-scale interactions among land, atmosphere, and ocean. A current program funded by Southern California Edison is examining sustainability in the context of the energy-water nexus. With experts in alpine snow pack, sediment transport and geomorphology, groundwater contaminants, limnology and wetlands inundation, and hydrology and watershed modeling, SMRW at Bren is a powerful focal point for developing this new science. Bren’s non-SMWR faculty, particularly those policy experts in the Governance for Sustainable Development cluster, can contribute greatly to our PhD students as they develop a comprehensive perspective on water sustainability issues and the major policy-relevant aspects of hydrological science.
PhD STUDENT RESEARCH
A Bren doctoral student’s research may reflect the disciplinary depth, breadth, overlap – or all three – that are at the core of the school’s multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental science and management. A list of past and current PhD research projects reveals a gamut of intellectual pursuits ranging from the highly theoretical to highly applied, but tending, overall, to be rooted to some extent in the pursuit of solutions to particular environmental problems. Some students pursue research based in the natural sciences, often in combination with related disciplines. One student may delve deeply into the physics of wave action and other marine turbulence, seeking to better understand the effect that fluid motions near air-water interfaces have on the transfer of chemicals across them. Another may investigate the interactions between bacteria and engineered nanoparticles as part of an effort to quantify the environmental effects of these new particles. Another might examine the sintering mechanisms in the Sierra snow pack, a process that has implications for avalanche prediction and the transport of pollutants through watersheds. And still another may be involved in taking DNA samples of California spiny lobster as part of an effort to determine the possibly distant source of lobster larvae that sustain the local lobster population. In a different vein, another student pursues research based partly in the natural sciences and partly in geographic informatics, with the intention of creating new evaluative and decision-making tools to bridge the frequently seen gap between science and policy. Another adopts a socio-psychological perspective in linking an examination of the resource-based limits to growth with a study of how patterns of resource consumption and an anthropocentric view of the environment affect human happiness and well-being. Others pursue economics-centered research, seeking to answer questions related to such topics as the allocation of natural resources, the design and economic value of conservation efforts, the political economy of public goods provision, or the functions and mechanisms that drive green markets. As corporations pursue sustainability, an increasing number of Bren PhD students are taking advantage of the School’s rising status in the emerging field of life cycle assessment (LCA), which is concerned with evaluating and quantifying the environmental impacts of processes associated with the entire life span of goods, from resource extraction through production and end of life. Because of its application-based, problem-solving orientation, the Bren School welcomes students whose research pursuits are sound, even though they may not fit into a more traditional PhD track. For example, based on professional experience working with oil in polar marine environments, one recent graduate wanted to design a better drum skimmer, an essential but fairly inefficient piece of oil-spill cleanup equipment that had been changed hardly at all for more than 25 years. Few schools would accept such an untraditional PhD proposal. The Bren School did, thanks to an open-minded advisor and PhD committee. The research involved assembling a team of experts in oceanography, materials science, mechanical engineering, physics, and chemistry and led to a redesigned skimmer that is now being produced and sold worldwide by the largest manufacturer of oil-spill recovery equipment in the United States. The Bren School supports and fosters dynamic new thinking and innovative approaches to topics within the field of environmental science and management. Our PhD students reflect that as they boldly pioneer new areas of thought and action, whether pursuing a career in academia, seeking solutions to environmental and natural resource issues, or, as in the case of the Bren School faculty, both. Prospective Students - Phd | Excellence | Research Expertise | Program Details | Admissions |
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