Center for Film, Television & New Media @ UCSB

Speaker Biographies (Page 1)
|-› :: Page 2 ::

Biographical summaries,
Rupe Environmental Media Initiative Conference
April 28, 2007

Jenn Bernstein (B.S., The Evergreen State College; M.A. in Geography, UC Santa Barbara) enjoys using commercial objects to illustrate the multiplicity of ways nature is viewed in contemporary American culture. To this end she has written and presented on fences, the depiction of nature in advertising, and the presence of gift shops in National Parks. She currently works as a research analyst and information designer for American Environics, a research and consulting firm that utilizes American social values data to further progressive political projects.

Steven Gaines (Ph.D., Oregon State University) is Director of the Marine Science Institute (since 1997) and Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, UC Santa Barbara. He served as Acting Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara from 2002 to 2005. Dr. Gaines is a marine ecologist with ongoing research on marine conservation, the design of marine reserves, the impact of climate change on marine habitats, and the coupling between ocean circulation and the dynamics of marine species. He has been working with Marine Life Protection Act efforts to establish a state-wide network of marine protected areas. Dr. Gaines has authored approximately 100 scientific publications, including three books.

Catherine Gautier (Doctorat d’Etat from the Université de Paris VI ) is Professor of Geography, UC Santa Barbara. She has been a principal investigator and science team member of several major programs including the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program of the Department of Energy and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder of the NASA. Professor Gautier has contributed broadly to climate research and climate education and outreach by publishing high school and undergraduate software to help students understand climate change issues. Professor Gautier is currently co-editing a book on climate change entitled Facing Climate Change Together, with contributions from climate experts from the U.S. and France, and writing a book entitled Oil, Water and Climate Security in which she shows the interconnectedness of oil, water, climate and population issues.

Michael Hanrahan is CEO and co-founder of The Ocean Channel (http://www.ocean.com), a media company focused on the production and distribution of ocean content for television, web, and home video markets. Michael is currently working on several media projects, including developing a web encyclopedia of marine creatures for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program and UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute on French Polynesia. He is also collaborating with The Nature Conservancy to produce a documentary film about their restoration work on Santa Cruz Island off of Southern California. Michael is on the faculty at the Brooks Institute of Photography (Santa Barbara, California), and, since 2004, he has been a board member of Santa Barbara’s Environmental Defense Council (EDC). In 2003, Michael launched the Santa Barbara Ocean Film Festival (SBOFF), an annual fundraising event for local environmental groups.

Paul Jay is Chair of independent world television - The Real News, a project to establish an independent news and current affairs network without government or corporate funding (www.TheRealNews.com). Jay co-produced Return to Kandahar, a feature length documentary. Jay's Lost in Las Vegas was a feature length documentary for A&E. Other projects include Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, a feature length documentary that screened in 25 major festivals and won more than a dozen awards, and Never-Endum-Referendum, a feature length documentary (CTV, SRC, Arte).Jay was creator and executive producer of CBSNewsworld’s flagship debate program counterSpin, for six seasons the prime time debate show about the news of the day. He was also the founding Chair of Hot Docs!, the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.

David Jensen (undergraduate degree in Resource Geography, University of Victoria; Master’s in Biology, University of Oxford) heads the Policy and Planning Unit of the UN Environment Programme's Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2000, he has worked on ten post-conflict operations either as a technical contributor or as a project coordinator. He has extensive experience in particular with Afghanistan, the UNEP response to the 2004 Tsunami and more recently the UNEP assessment work in Sudan. During this time, he has tried to pioneer the use of state of the art communication products including the use of film.

Charles Kolstad (Ph.D. Stanford) is an environmental economist, jointly appointed in the Bren School and the Economics Department, UC Santa Barbara. He is also the Director of the Economics & Environmental Science IGERT Program (NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program -- http://media.igert.ucsb.edu/). He has held faculty appointments at the University of Illinois, MIT and Stanford, and served for two years in the Peace Corps in Ghana. Prof. Kolstad’s research interests are broadly in environmental and natural resource economics, currently emphasizing the economics of climate change and energy markets. He is a co-editor of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, a former president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and a Lead Author for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

David Lea (Ph.D., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is Professor of Chemical Oceanography, Paleoceanography, and Paleoclimatology, UC Santa Barbara. The goal of his research is to use the chemical and isotopic record encoded in the marine archive to study past oceans and climates over time scales of centuries to hundreds of thousands of years, in order to explain the mechanisms for global climate change. He is particularly interested in climate change in the tropical oceans and the relationship between climate change and the biogeochemical cycle of carbon dioxide. The trace element and isotopic composition of foraminifera and corals preserved in the geological record provides the window into past ocean climate and composition.

David Marshall (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins,1979) is Professor of English, and Dean, Humanities and Fine Arts, and Executive Dean, College of Letters and Science, UC Santa Barbara. He served on the faculty at Yale University for 18 years as a professor of English and Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of English, Director of The Literature Major, and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, among other administrative positions. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and Yale's Morse Fellowship. He is the author of The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (1988) and The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (1986). He is currently working on Representation Compulsions, a study of the problematic status of art in eighteenth-century fiction and aesthetics.

|-› :: Top of Page ::

|-› :: Page 2 ::