Our Team
The Lab
Josh Lawler
Professor
Josh is the Denman Professor of Sustainable Resource Sciences in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and the Director of Nature & Health at the University of Washington. He received his AB from Bowdoin College and his MS and PhD in ecology from Utah State University. Josh is a landscape ecologist and conservation biologist driven by applied conservation questions and their real-world applications. He is most interested in how anthropogenic factors affect species distributions, population dynamics, and community composition at regional and continental scales. His research involves investigating the effects of climate change on species distributions and populations, exploring the influence of landscape pattern on animal populations and communities, and climate-change adaptation for natural and human systems. Some of his current work has also begun to investigate the connection between time spent in nature and mental and physical health.
Yian Lin
PhD Student
Yian is a PhD student in the Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) program. She is interested in applying statistical methods to support decision making in conservation, urban planning, and sustainability. Her PhD research will center on species vulnerability assessment under climate change. Her previous work focuses on studying the relationship between the surrounding environments and people’s subjective well-being using social media data and sentiment analysis tools. She enjoys working with data, building statistical models, and thinking about the most appropriate way to make an inference and extract useful information from data to answer real-world questions. Yian holds a B.S. in Statistical Science, with a minor in Applied Psychology, from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2017) and an M.S. in Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management from the University of Washington (2021).
Sarah Chase
PhD Student
Sarah Chase is a doctoral student co-advised by Josh Lawler and Stanley Asah. She holds a master’s degree in geography from San Diego State University, where her research focused on environmental attitudes and behaviors of natural resource monitoring volunteers. Before returning to graduate school, she worked for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on water quality management, as well as for an environmental nonprofit in Missouri. Her current research interests focus on the design and evaluation of interventions to promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. For her dissertation, she is evaluating the effectiveness of a mobile app designed to increase children's time in nature and their connectedness with nature.
Julia Michalak
Research Scientist
Julia is a research scientist in the School of Environment and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. She has a PhD in urban ecology and an M.S. in conservation biology. Her research focuses on evaluating climate-change vulnerability and resilience of species, ecosystems, and protected areas to inform climate-change adaptation planning. She works with species and protected areas managers, including the National Parks Service and State Fish and Wildlife Agencies, to develop, synthesize, and apply climate science to management issues with a focus on mapping and managing climate-change refugia and climate connectivity.
.jpg)
Nameeta Prasad
MS Student
Nameeta is a Fulbright research scholar from India where she works for the federal government on its environmental programs. She have specialized in audits of environmental issues like waste management, water pollution, and biodiversity which have had high impacts as the executive initiated changes in governance systems, recommended in the reports. She also led a team that set up a global center of excellence in the field of training on environmental/sustainability issues. There, she designed and delivered training programs on environmental/sustainability issues. She has a degree in environmental law and policy from the National Law School, Bangalore. Her interests lie in conservation, climate change, biodiversity, management of natural resources. My research is in the field of ecosystem services and climate change impacts on the delivery of ecosystem services. She is an avid reader with a preference for espionage novels!
Chris Randels
Post-bac Researcher
Chris is a postbaccalaureate student interested in the intersections of climate change mitigation with urban land use and forest management. His undergradutate thesis examines inequities in climate impacts and access to services between higher and lower income Seattle neighborhoods across travel modes. Future research interests include the changes in forest ecosystems' responses to pathogens due to climate change, city residents' usage and responses to shared mobility services, and city infrastructure gaps that influence the effectiveness of shared mobility as a first/last mile solution. Outside of school, Chris is a member of Eastside environmental organizations seeking to reduce municipal carbon dioxide emissions through revisions in transportation and land use policy. Chris has a Bachelor of Science in Applied German Language and Intercultural Studies from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lab Alumni
Alumnus Position in the lab Current Affiliation
Ben Dittbrenner PhD student Northeastern University
Caitlin Littlerfield PhD student University of Vermont
Catherine Means MS student US Forest Service
D. Scott Rinnan MS and PhD student Yale University
Rosemary Pazdral MS student Oregon Sate University
Aimee Fullerton PhD student NOAA
Michael Case PhD and Postdoc The Nature Conservancy, WA
Se-Yeun Lee PostDoc Seattle University
Maureen Ryan Postdoc Conservation Science Partners
Peter Singleton PhD student US Forest Service
Jenny McGuire Postdoc Georgia Tech
Jennifer Duggan Postdoc California State University, Monterey
Theresa Nogeire Postdoc Oregon State University
Julie Hienrichs Postdoc Colorado State University
Jessie Langdon MS student Weyerhaeuser
Christie Galitsky MS student Blue Ventures, Madagascar
Chad Wilsey PhD and Postdoc Audubon Society
Carrie Schloss MS student The Nature Conservancy, CA
John Withey Postdoc The Evergreen Sate College
Jorge Ramos MS student Stanford University
Tristan Nuñez MS student University of Wyoming
Aaron Ruesch MS student Wisconsin DNR
Lesley Jantarasami MS student US EPA
Evan Girvetz Postdoc CGIAR
Betsy Bancroft Postdoc Ganzaga University