Speaker Bios
Mary Lee Knecht
Sacramento River Watershed Program
Mary Lee serves as SRWP's Executive Director and key spokesperson. In this role, Mary Lee provides leadership, creates vision for the organization, and conducts strategic planning with SRWP's 21-member Board and dedicated team of staff. She is also responsible for the development of an annual work plan and budget, which incorporates the goals and objectives that work toward the strategic direction of the organization. Mary Lee always seeks to establish good working relationships and collaborative
arrangements with community groups, funders, elected officials, and other stakeholders to help achieve the goals and elevate the visibility of the organization. Additionally, Mary Lee is involved in project management and implementation of several of SRWP's exciting grant projects.
Mary Lee comes to SRWP with over 11 years of experience in watershed management and water policy work. Prior to joining the SRWP team, Mary Lee worked for Jones & Stokes, where she served as lead consultant to the CALFED Watershed Program and other important watershed planning efforts throughout Northern California. She serves on the Board of Directors of the California Watershed Network, is an alumni of the Water Education Foundation's Water Leaders Class, and participates on a number of water
policy advisory committees and task forces. Mary Lee has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley.
Mary Nichols
California Air Resources Board Chairman
On January 05, 2011, Governor Jerry Brown re-appointed Mary D. Nichols as Chairman of the California Air Resources Board, a post she has held since 2007. She served as Chairman in Governor Brown's first Administration, from 1978 to 1983.
Nichols has devoted her entire career in public and private, not-for-profit service to advocating for the environment and public health. In addition to her work at the Air Board, she has held a number of positions, including: assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Air and Radiation program under the Clinton Administration, Secretary for California's Resources Agency from 1999 to 2003, and Director of the University of California, Los Angeles Institute of the Environment.
As one of California's first environmental lawyers, she initiated precedent-setting test cases under the Federal Clean Air Act and California air quality laws while practicing as a staff attorney for the Center for Law in the Public Interest. Nichols holds a Juris Doctorate degree from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University.
In her return as Chairman, Nichols' priorities include moving the state's landmark climate change program ahead, as well as steering the Board through numerous efforts to curb diesel pollution at ports, and continuing to pass regulations aimed at providing cleaner air for Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley. She values innovation, partnerships and common-sense approaches to addressing the state's air issues.
The Air Resources Board leads the country in working with the public, the business sector, and local governments to protect the public's health, the economy and the state's ecological resources through the most cost-effective reduction of air pollution. The Board now employs roughly 1,200 engineers, scientists and attorneys, with an annual operating budget of more than $860 million.
Fraser Shilling
UC Davis
Fraser has lived in Davis and worked at UC Davis for the past 14 years. He lives with various animals, his wife, Mandy, and his kids, Emmett, Gregory, and Elsa. Although work and proposal-writing sometimes consumes all of his time, he also gives himself time to garden, work with bees, spend time with the kids, canoe, mountaineer, surf-kayak, and read.
He has 3 main areas of research: environmental pollution and policy, transportation & landscape ecology, and indicator system for whole system condition reporting. He is Co-Director of the Road Ecology Center and member of the Environmental Justice Project and of the Information Center for the Environment. He supports graduate students and others in each of his research areas and is always open to more. His research is extramurally funded through grants and contracts, from local, state, and federal
sources. Recent studies and publications of his have addressed environmental justice issues associated with Bay-Delta decision-making and contamination, connectivity assessment and planning at multiple geographic scales and with changing impacts, and development of multi-metric system for evaluating the condition of combined social, environmental, and economic systems.
Lisa Micheli
Pepperwood Preserve
Dr. Micheli has over 20 years experience applying her technical, policy, and fundraising expertise to the design and implementation of ecological restoration and education programs. She worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 (San Francisco) watershed program before completing her graduate work at UC Berkeley on the impact of riparian forests on river function. Her post-doctoral research at UC Davis on the Sacramento River helped to guide the Nature Conservancy's large-scale
restoration effort there. From 2000-2009 she helped guide the Sonoma Ecology Center's comprehensive community-based approach to the restoration of the Sonoma Valley watershed. She also served as director of the Napa River's Rutherford Reach Restoration Team from 2004-2009. She is the co-principal investigator of Water's Edge, a regional climate change adaptation initiative in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences. She joined Sonoma County's Pepperwood Foundation in October of 2009
as its first Executive Director. At Pepperwood she will focus on launching the Dwight Center for Conservation (opening Spring 2010) and growing Pepperwood's research and education programs via a network of conservation partners throughout the region.
Joan Clayburgh
Sierra Nevada Alliance
Joan Clayburgh is the Executive Director of the Sierra Nevada Alliance, joining the organization in December of 2001. The Sierra Nevada Alliance has been protecting and restoring Sierra land, water, wildlife and communities since 1993. The organization has over 80 member groups that work on conservation issues throughout the 400 mile long region. Primary programs address climate change, water quality and growth and development. Joan has over 20 years experience in non-profit management. Prior
to the Sierra Nevada she was the Sierra Club national press secretary, a founder and campaign director for the coalition Californians for Pesticide Reform, executive director of Pesticide Watch, and campaign director for CALPIRG. She has provided technical assistance, training, and consultation to grassroots organizations throughout her career. Her specialty is leveraging coalition resources to achieve reforms at the local, state and national level. Joan graduated from Tahoe Truckee High School
in 1981 and has a BA in communication from the University of California, San Diego. She is an outdoor enthusiast enjoying skiing, hiking, and camping with her husband and two dogs.
Mike Antos
Los Angeles/San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council
In addition to his role at the Council, he is a lecturer at California State University Northridge (CSUN), where he teaches physical geography and meteorology, some GIS and occasional cultural or regional geography courses. He has also served as Research Assistant in the Southern California Wetlands Mapping project, managed from the Center for Geographic Studies at CSUN.
Earning an MA in Geography from California State University Northridge in 2006, his thesis engaged a GIS-based spatial analysis of Los Angeles, using the site-selection methodology of the Sun Valley Watershed Plan, to discover other locations within the city that would most benefit from similar projects as are underway in Sun Valley. Presentation of this work earned him recognition at a statewide graduate research symposium within the California State University.
As a Graduate Research Assistant at USC GIS Research Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. John Wilson, he utilized a terrain modeling approach to analyze the stormwater infiltration capacity of the headwaters region of the Los Angeles River. This analysis is included in the lab's Technical Report No. 6 (Swift, Antos, Wilson & Sheng, 2008) funded by a grant awarded to the Mountains Restoration Trust.
His research interests are focused on how the perception of nature (and natural 'resources') directly effects our interaction with our surroundings. Finding ways to reorient the assumed duality of urban / nature in the mind of stakeholders and the public is of both practical and research interest to him. At home he spends time with his wife, Cheryl (a great wedding photographer), and his young son, Joe. He enjoys his garden, his iMac, his library card, and getting outside as much as possible.
Nancy Steele
Los Angeles/San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council
Dr. Nancy Steele is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles & San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, a center for practical watershed research, analysis, and collaboration in Los Angeles County. The Watershed Council has recently completed the Elmer Avenue Neighborhood Retrofit in Sun Valley, CA, to demonstrate of the principles of green infrastructure redevelopment and monitor the effectiveness of stormwater best management practices. The Council also manages two large watershed monitoring
programs on the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers in Los Angeles County, promotes water conservation through educating professionals about sustainable landscapes, operates a program of symposia and conferences and publishes a quarterly magazine for decision makers and other stakeholders in the watershed. Prior to joining the Watershed Council in 2005, Nancy worked for California's Environmental Protection and Health and Human Services Agencies in a variety of positions. She has managed a team tasked
with improving our air quality through reducing emissions from heavy duty diesel trucks and buses; served as deputy Ombudsman for the Air Resources Board; developed regulations to reduce childhood lead poisoning; conducted a study of environmental lead contamination in Los Angeles County, and enforced compliance with hazardous waste control laws. Her dissertation compared the environmental and health consequences of the recycling and waste management life stages of batteries for electric vehicles.
Nancy is currently a board member of the Marine Conservation Research Institute; vice-chair of the Upper Los Angeles IRWMP steering committee; member of the Leadership Committee of the Greater Los Angeles County IRWMP; member of the Women's Environmental Council; and founding President of the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy. She is a co-owner of the Chaparral Mountain Honey Company.
Expertise: Water Resources, Architecture & Urban Planning, Land, Open Space, Smart Growth
Caitlin Cornwall
Sonoma Ecology Center
Deanne DePietro
Sonoma Ecology Center
Katherine Wieckowski
ESSA Technologies Inc
Katherine is a Systems Ecologist with ESSA's Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Team. Her work focuses on improving fisheries and water management through the use of qualitative and quantitative tools to inform decision making. She earned a B.Sc. from McGill University (double major in Biology and International Development Studies) and a Master of Resource Management (Fisheries Science) from Simon Fraser University.
Over the past five years she has worked on a number of fisheries issues in both marine and freshwater environments. This work has concentrated on different scales of interest including: individual watersheds (e.g., Columbia, Sacramento, Fraser, and Okanagan basins), Fisheries and Oceans Canada management areas, well as at the provincial scale. Katherine has worked on several projects relating to different aspects of salmon management in BC (e.g., Wild Salmon Policy, use of traditional and local
knowledge in salmon management) and the Pacific Northwest (e.g., monitoring and evaluation in the Trinity River; hydro analyses for the Columbia Basin). She has also worked extensively on developing habitat indicators and monitoring designs for both conservation and recovery purposes.
Prior to joining ESSA, Katherine worked on several conservation projects including: a recovery strategy for arctic Bowhead, assessment of ecosystem health using amphibians as indicators of environmental quality, and monitoring seahorse populations and the fishing pressures exerted on them. Her thesis work focused on alternative methods for modelling fisherman behaviour and knowledge to predict the spatial distribution of fishing effort in response to management actions.
Tam Doduc
State Water Resources Control Board Member
Tam is the Professional Civil Engineer Member of the State Water Resources Control Board, which has the joint authority of water right allocation and water quality protection in California. Her focus areas include ocean protection, water recycling, climate change, research and monitoring, groundwater protection, and organizational performance measurement and strategic planning. Tam previously served as Deputy Secretary at the California Environmental Protection Agency. Her environmental experience
includes work in air quality, environmental justice, scientific peer review, hazardous substances control, health risk assessment, and environmental technology certification. In her free time, Tam enjoys biking and landscape photography.
Marcos Athanasoulis
Healthy Communities Institutes
Dr. Athanasoulis is the Chief Technology Officer for the Healthy Communities Institute. Dr. Athanasoulis, the chief architect of the Healthy Communities Network system, works on issues of interoperability of information systems with other information systems, scalability and oversees research. Also Director of Research Information Technology and Client Services for Harvard Medical School, Dr. Athanasoulis there leads the development of high performance computing infrastructure to support biomedical
and healthcare research. Dr. Athanasoulis has worked in both the public and private sector to improve quality and efficiency of healthcare and the environment through information systems. Dr. Athanasoulis holds an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and a DrPH in Health Informatics from the University of California at Berkeley.
John Lowrie
Statewide Watershed Program Manager, California Department of Conservation
Kamyar Guivetchi
Manager, Statewide Integrated Water Management California Department of Water Resources
During his 29 years with DWR, Mr. Guivetchi has worked on numerous projects with the Central District, the Bay-Delta Office, the Division of Environmental Services, and the Division of Planning and Local Assistance. In his current assignment, he managed the DWR staff work and the public comment process for the California Water Plan, Update 2005. He is also working on the 2009 update to the water plan, the Delta Vision initiative to develop a vision and strategic plan for sustainable management of
the Delta and Suisun, and the FloodSafe initiative to develop a sustainable flood management system and reduce flood risk.
Karen Larsen
Deputy Director of Office of Information Management and Analysis, State Water Resources Control Board
Chris Ratekin
Chief, Office of Community Planning, California Department of Transportation
Dejeune Shelton
Interim Executive Director, Great Valley Center
Dejeuné M. Shelton is Interim Executive Director and Senior Program Manager responsible for all aspects of program design and implementation including ensuring the quality of the programs, products, and communications produced meet the high standard of excellence of the organization.
Before joining the Great Valley Center in 2008, Dejeuné served as President of the Westside Community Alliance (WCA), a grass roots organization focused on improving communities and families residing on the Westside of Stanislaus County with a focus on the City of Patterson.
Dejeuné is very active in her community, serving as a City Council Member for the City of Patterson (2006-2010), and is a member of the Westside Health Task Force, the California League of Cities Community Services Policy Committee, and a Board Member for the Stanislaus County Red Cross.
Dejeuné earned her B.A. in sociology from California State University Stanislaus.
Jessica VanArsdale
Director, California Center for Rural Policy, California State
University Humboldt
Jessica was born and raised in rural northern California. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her Medical Degree from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed a residency in Family Medicine and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University and concurrently completed a Masters in Public Health at Portland State University. Her training focused on health administration and policy, population based medicine and epidemiology.
Her research interests include health disparities, access to healthcare in rural communities, preventive medicine and environmental and global health.
Tina Swanson
Formerly of The Bay Institute
Measuring the triple bottom-line of equity, environment, and economy is critical for growing sustainability in California