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Council Members

Members are representatives from institutions and agencies that are partner organizations that comprise the Council and provide an equal representation on behalf of California and Nevada. Membership will rotate based on availability and interest.

Monica Arienzo

Monica Arienzo is an Assistant Research Professor in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences at the Desert Research Institute. In her research, Monica uses chemical tools to understand how humans have impacted the environment. After years of studying caves in the Bahamas and ice cores from Antarctica, now she studies microplastics from peak to tap. Her microplastic research focuses on microplastics found in snowy peaks, to downstream lakes and rivers, and to drinking water taps.

Sudeep Chandra

Sudeep graduated in 2003 with a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California- Davis under the guidance of Dr. Charles Goldman. He moved to the Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin- Madison to conduct a postdoctoral research with Dr. Jake Vander Zanden. Currently, Sudeep is an Associate Professor of Limnology and Conservation Ecology at the University of Nevada, Reno (USA); he serves as Director of the University’s new initiative the Global Water Center: Solutions for Sustainability. Since 1997, as participant in the Tahoe-Baikal Institute, a Russian-American exchange program, and later as a graduate student and professor, Sudeep’s research has focused on quantifying the ecological changes in Lake Tahoe from the introduction of species, the loss of native biodiversity and its implications for altering nutrient dynamics and clarity in the lake. His scientific efforts have been closely linked to the needs of the management community; guiding some of the recent policies to protect Lake Tahoe. Starting in 2005, Sudeep became the coDirector of the Castle Lake Environmental Research and Education Program. This program supports the longest (>57+ year) running collection of ecological data in North and South America.  In this position, he incorporates place-based learning approaches when training students and post-doctoral researchers from the United States and other countries in limnological field methods and analysis.  In 2012-13, Sudeep served as a Program Director at the U. S. National Science Foundation.  He has received awards for his efforts including: American Fisheries Society’s CA-NV Award of Excellence, the Tahoe-Baikal Institute Alumni of the Year, University of Nevada’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources Teacher of the Year, and his favorite, the Mad Hatter’s Award from the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Hydrologic Sciences, which he now serves as an Acting coDirector. He feels like there is much more to give in life, and will continue to work to help his fellow humans and the environment in which they inhabit. 

http://www.unr.edu/biology/people/sudeep-chandrahttp://www.unr.edu/biology/people/sudeep-chandra

Paul Comba

Chief, Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Bureau of Water Quality Planning.

Ashley Conrad-Saydah

Ashley Conrad-Saydah is a public policy expert whose work has focused on finding inter-disciplinary solutions to seemingly intractable climate and energy challenges.

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Conrad-Saydah’s work with CCCI is in collaboration with colleagues from UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources, and The Nature Conservancy, where she will be building and implementing regional frameworks to improve natural resources and public health, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before joining CCCI she was Deputy Secretary for Climate Policy at the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA), appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown 2012.

Prior to joining CalEPA, she served as California’s Renewable Energy Program Manager for the United States Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In that position, she helped to establish and advance key state-federal partnerships, engaged stakeholders in determining the best places for utility-scale solar, wind and transmission development and drafted and instituted national monitoring and mitigation policies for renewable energy development on public lands.

Joe Domagalski

Studies nutrient cycling, mercury loading and transformations, and pesticide occurrence in environmental matrices in California and select locations nationwide.  These studies also involve surface and ground water systems. He is the Co-Lead Scientist for Clear Lake Modeling and Monitoring Project which involves the monitoring of Clear Lake tributaries for nutrient and mercury concentrations and developing a watershed wide model of sources and loads of these constituents from a variety of sources including geologic and anthropogenic. He is also the Lead Scientist for developing a dynamic model of seasonal loading of phosphorus to Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon.

Adrian Harpold

Dr. Adrian Harpold is a Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science at the University of Nevada, Reno.  His interests are in understanding the fate and transport of water, energy, carbon, and biogeochemical solutes at the landscape scale through improved understanding of ecohydrological processes.  His research threads between basic and applied science.  His current research focus is on understanding changing mountain hydrology as a consequence of climate and land cover change.  He works actively in the central Sierra Nevada, with field sites of the West Shore of Lake Tahoe and Sagehen Creek Watershed that are used to study ecohydrology and forest management.


https://naes.unr.edu/harpold/

Jim Lawrence

Jim Lawrence became Deputy Director in 2015, previously serving as Special Advisor to the Director and before that as the Administrator of the Nevada Division of State Lands. Jim currently represents the Department on the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Governing Board. Jim has more than twenty years of resource protection and land use planning experience in Nevada. He has been responsible for coordination of Nevada’s environmental improvement efforts at Lake Tahoe, implementation of a multi-agency statewide conservation and natural resource protection grant program, efforts for the protection of Nevada’s sagebrush ecosystem, administration of the Conservation Districts program, and served as Executive Officer for the Nevada State Land Use Planning Agency.

Pat Manley

Pat Manley is the Research Program Manager, Conservation of Biodiversity Program with the Pacific Southwest Research Station, US Forest Service, Department of Agriculture.  She havs a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Wildland Resource Science, with an emphasis on biological diversity and vertebrate community ecology. She has worked for the National Forest System for nearly 15 years in various positions throughout the Pacific Southwest Region.  She currently serve on the Tahoe Bi-State Science Advisory Council, and prior to that I served on the Tahoe Science Consortium’s Committee of Scientists.  


https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/cb/staff/manley/

John Melack

John M. Melack is a Professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He attended Cornell University (B.A. in Biological Sciences) and Duke University (Ph.D. in Limnology), held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. His honors include being an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Currently, he is an Associate Editor for Biogeochemistry and on the Editorial Boards for Hydrobiologia and Limnology & Oceanography.

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     Melack's research has emphasized ecological processes in lakes, wetlands and streams, and hydrological and biogeochemical aspects of catchments. He has conducted multi-year studies of freshwater and saline lakes in eastern Africa and floodplains in the Amazon and Pantanal of South America. In California, his studies of the saline Mono Lake and high-elevation lakes in the Sierra Nevada have continued for over 30 years, and he is involved in the second decade of an LTER examining linkages among coastal watersheds, near-shore kelp ecosystems and offshore waters in Santa Barbara Channel. He has applied active and passive microwave and optical remote sensing to studies of lakes and tropical wetlands.  


http://msi.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/john-melack

Max Moritz

Max has been a statewide wildfire specialist within UC Cooperative Extension since 2004 and is also now an adjunct professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of his research is focused on understanding the dynamics of fire regimes at relatively broad scales and applying this information to planning and management of fire-prone landscapes. He has used a number of different spatial approaches to quantitative analyses of fire history patterns that stems from his early work on chaparral shrublands in the Santa Barbara region.


https://moritzfirelab.org/

Ramon Naranjo

Ramon C. Naranjo is a research hydrologist at the U.S Geological Survey with professional experience in fate and transport of nutrients in groundwater and surface water systems.  He has 24 years of experience at federal and state agencies investigating legacy environmental contaminants in soils and groundwater. His field of interests include biogeochemical processes, nutrient cycling and transport.  During the last few years, he has focused on understanding nutrient cycling in hyporheic zones and developing models to describe coupled heat and reactive transport.  The objectives of his research is to understand the linkages between ecosystems and biogeochemical processes at the sediment-water interface. 

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     Dr. Naranjo has used his field experience to develop, design, and patent a new self-contained distributed temperature probe for use in quantifying groundwater flow rate and direction.  This probe has been useful for long-term monitoring that has contributed to understanding and quantifying time-variable processes such as flow rates and describing subsurface heterogeneity using advanced model calibration techniques.  Recent research has demonstrated the utility of the probe in Lake Tahoe nearshore environments to characterize nutrient transformations and groundwater discharge.


https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/ramon-c-naranjo/

Steve Sadro

Steven Sadro is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, at the University of California, Davis.  His work focuses on how biological, physical, and chemical factors interact to regulate aquatic systems. He completed his Ph.D. in limnology at UC Santa Barbara before joining the faculty at UC Davis in 2016.

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     Dr. Sadro combines the use of long-term watershed studies with experimental manipulations and comparative analyses to understand ecological processes in habitats ranging from alpine and arctic lakes, to coastal streams and estuaries. Much of his research is conducted in the Sierra Nevada of California, where steep mountain gradients provide a natural laboratory to study these dynamics. Ultimately, his research seeks to inform management policies to chart a path toward the continued health and conservation of our aquatic ecosystems.


http://desp.ucdavis.edu/people/steven-sadro

Geoff Schladow

Dr. Geoffrey Schladow holds B. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering from the University of Western Australia, and an M. Eng. in hydraulic engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. For over thirty years his research has focused on the interactions between the complex fluid motions found in nature and their impacts on water quality, ecosystem health and watershed processes. He has published over 250 research papers and technical reports, and has guided over 75 graduate students. Dr. Schladow is an expert on both field data collection and numerical modeling, and frequently brings together teams of researchers to work on large, interdisciplinary projects in the US and internationally.


     Dr. Schladow is a Professor of water resources and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, and is the founding director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC).  


https://faculty.engineering.ucdavis.edu/gschladow

Tamara Wall

Dr. Tamara Wall is a researcher in the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC); the program for Climate, Ecosystem, and Fire Applications (CEFA); and the California-Nevada Applications Program (CNAP). She is involved in several on-going and planned projects related to integrating social science research with the production of climate knowledge and services at CNAP and the WRCC.

Josh Wilson

Josh Wilson is the Research Program Manager for Fire and Fuels, and Urban Ecosystems and Social Dynamics with the Pacific Southwest Research Station, US Forest Service, Department of Agriculture.  Josh began his Forest Service Career as a Resource Economist for Ecosystem Management Coordination in Fort Collins, CO in 2006.  During his time as an Economist, Josh worked on a variety of natural resource projects across several Forest Service Regions.  In 2010 he transitioned to the Shasta-Trinity National Forest where he worked as the Ecosystem Staff Officer.  Josh later accepted the position of Executive Officer of TEAMS Enterprise where he led a multitude of collaborative efforts across the country in support of natural resource conservation.  Josh holds a BS in Managerial Economics, emphasizing in agriculture, from the University of California, Davis and an MS in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Colorado State University where he has also served as an instructor of Agricultural Marketing.   Josh is honored to serve on the Tahoe Science Advisory Council, and is excited to continue working on challenging issues in dynamic and diverse environments.  He enjoys fostering partnerships in the interest of preserving natural resources for current and future generations.  Josh is a Northern California native and has a strong passion for outdoor recreation on public lands.  He is an avid hunter and fisherman and enjoys spending time in the outdoors with his friends and family.

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