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 Associate Research Professor in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences at the Desert Research Institute where she leads the Microplastics and Environmental Chemistry Lab. She earned a doctoral degree in Marine Geology and Geophysics from the University of Miami and a B.A. in Geology from Franklin and Marshall College. She serves on advisory boards and committees at the local and state level including the California Water Quality Microplastics subcommittee. In her research, Monica uses chemical tools to understand how humans have impacted the environment. Her microplastic research focuses on microplastics found in snowy peaks, downstream lakes and rivers, and drinking water taps. She also studies the impact of wildfires on water quality and the impacts of naturally occurring metals on groundwater in northern Nevada. Arienzo is committed to engaging students, managers, and citizen scientist in her research. https://www.dri.edu/directory/monica-arienzo/
Sudeep Chandra
Dr. Sudeep Chandra is a Foundation Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Nevada Reno. In addition, he is the lead in developing the university of Nevada‘s new Tahoe Institute for Global Sustainability lunch launched in 2026 from the University’s Lake Tahoe campus. Professor Chandra received a B.S. in limnology and environmental biology and management and his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis. He did postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Chandra’s management and advisory experiences include serving as a director for the United States National Science Foundation’s ecosystem science program as well as on numerous exchanges, advisory committees, and policy forums related to conserving the freshwaters managed by the US National Park Service, and agencies within Guatemala, Cambodia, Mongolia, the Russian Arctic, and Chilean Patagonia. He is president of the board of the directors of the Walker Basin Conservancy. Professor Chandra’s current research interests include understanding how disturbances influences freshwater ecosystem function from biodiversity maintenance to the transformation of nutrients and carbon. Connecting science to direct policy actions is another important focal area for professor Chandra. More information about Dr. Chandra’s see www.unr.edu/tigs
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. 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.
Alex Forrest
Alexander L. Forrest is an Associate Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Associate Director at the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at the University of California, Davis. He attended McMaster University (B.Eng. in Chemical Engineering & Society; B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences) before attending the University of British Columbia (M.A.Sc. and PhD in Civil Engineering) and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at UCDavis. He then was appointed as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Australia where he founded the Autonomous Maritime Systems Laboratory under the Antarctic Gateway Project and continues to serve on the Engineering Committee on Oceanic Resources (ECOR) Specialist Panel on Underwater Vehicles. Since returning to UCDavis, he has served in many administrative and research roles at local, state, national and international levels and was notably the President of the California Lake Management Society. Recently he established the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) Environmental Robotics Lab @ Tahoe which is continuing to grow. He makes frequent contributions to a number of scientific and engineering journals. His research goals are to create sustainable solutions to environmental engineering problems with specific focus the influence of physical processes have on ocean and lake ecosystems. His wide-ranging background and publishing record has provided the framework to address many contemporary issues in the broad field of water quality and pollution control. His specific long-term aim is to couple understanding of physical and chemical processes in marine and freshwater using autonomous robotic systems. https://faculty.engineering.ucdavis.edu/forrest/
Jason Kuchnicki
Jason Kuchnicki is Chief of the Bureau of Water Quality Planning (BWQP) within the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP). He has a B.S. in Geology from Kent State University and a M.S. in Hydrology from the University of Nevada Reno, where his research focused on sediment loads from tributaries to and within the Truckee River in support of total maximum daily load (TMDL) development for the California portions of the waterbody. While at NDEP, he served as the Nevada representative throughout development of the Lake Tahoe total maximum daily load, including assisting in pioneering the Lake Clarity Crediting Program and Lake Tahoe TMDL management system. He currently manages a team of fourteen staff members within several different programs including water quality standards, assessment, and monitoring; biological assessment and monitoring; nonpoint source pollution management; total maximum daily load; and 401 certification. https://ndep.nv.gov/water/rivers-streams-lakes
Pat Manley
Patricia N Manley is a Research Ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, Adjunct Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a California Academy of Sciences Fellow. She attended Cal Poly Humboldt (B.S. in Wildlife Management and M.S. in Natural Resources Science) and University of California Berkeley (Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science). She served as lead wildlife ecologist for the 18 National Forests across California and served as a subject matter expert for the U.S. Forest Service across the country. She studied riparian biodiversity across the Lake Tahoe basin, and lived in the basin from 1995 to 2002, and has continued to contribute to conservation and environmental quality to the present. Once she earned her Ph.D., she became a research scientist working in California, across the country and internationally to study biodiversity conservation science, disturbance dynamics across forested landscapes, and measuring and systems for monitoring socio-ecological conditions and resilience. Most of her career has been dedicated to enhancing our understanding of the role and impact of management in sustaining and improving biological integrity, and to making scientific information on biodiversity, natural resource dynamics, and ecosystem resilience readily accessible and applicable to managers and policy makers through models, decision support tools, and monitoring. She has served in many science leadership roles, including leading a biodiversity research program across California, Hawaii, and the U.S.- affiliated Pacific Islands, leading multiple large research projects across the western U.S., leading the development of regional and national environmental monitoring strategies, and contributing to the science leadership of the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. She also serves on editorial boards and serves as a guest editor for multiple scientific journals. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patricia-Manley-2?ev=hdr_xprf
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), and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. He played a seminal rote in the establishment and development of the Bren School of Environmental Management at UCSB. His honors include being an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served advisory boards and committees at local, state, national and international levels including: Community Environmental Council (Santa Barbara), Independent Science Board for the CalFed Bay-Delta, NASA’s Earth Observing System; Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere program in the Amazon. He is an Associate Editor for three scientific journals: Biogeochemistry, Hydrobiologia and Limnology & Oceanography. 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, He has applied active and passive microwave and optical remote sensing to studies of lakes and tropical wetlands. https://www.eemb.ucsb.edu/people/emeriti/melack
Max Moritz
Max A. Moritz is a University of California Cooperative Extension Wildfire Specialist and an Adjunct Professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at University of California, Santa Barbara. Max did his undergraduate work at UC San Diego (Management Science), a masters at Boston University (Energy and Environmental Studies), a PhD at UC Santa Barbara (Geography/Spatial Ecology). Past experience includes being co-founder and co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Fire Research and Outreach, a member of the Australian Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre’s Scientific Advisory Panel, co-lead of UC ANR’s Fire Workgroup, and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Much of his research is on the dynamics and effects of fire regimes at relatively broad scales, including drivers of fire hazard, projections of climate change effects, and home loss studies. More recent work emphasizes drought stress and plant flammability. Through his extension activities, Max aims to apply scientific information for sustainable planning and management decisions on fire-prone landscapes. https://moritzfirelab.org/
Ramon Naranjo
Ramon Naranjo is a Research Hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from New Mexico Highlands University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Hydrology from the University of Nevada. He has served on advisory boards and committees for various organizations, including the Tahoe Science Advisory Council, the Walker Basin Conservancy, and the USGS Southwest Region Climate Adaptation Science Center. He is also the editor of the Journal of Nevada Water Resources. Dr. Naranjo's research focuses on the complex relationship between groundwater (GW) and surface water (SW) and its impact on ecosystems and water availability. He uses a combination of data collection, analysis, and modeling to measure the rate of GW-SW exchange in streams, canals, and lake beds. In his work, he has developed innovative methods to analyze the relationship between flow, nutrients and ecosystem response. His research also includes evaluating how watershed processes (sediments and nutrients) affect water quality in the nearshore (littoral) and open-water (pelagic) zones of Lake Tahoe. He is currently involved in interdisciplinary research on terminal lakes of the Great Basin to monitor and assess water availability, bird movements, and habitat suitability. Additionally, he holds a patent for a probe he designed to characterize heat and water flow in porous materials, which has been used in studies of rivers, canals, and nearshore lake environments. https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/ramon-c-naranjo#publications
Steve Sadro
Steven Sadro, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. He earned his Ph.D. in Limnology from UC Santa Barbara, where his dissertation focused on mountain lakes, with an emphasis on understand process governing landscape variability and ecosystem metabolic rates. His management and advising experience include leading multi-institutional research projects funded by federal and state agencies, serving on the strategic planning committees for the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) and the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), and participating on the executive committees of the Graduate Group in Ecology and the Hydrological Sciences Graduate Group at UC Davis. He currently serves on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) committee reviewing the Long-Term Operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. He has served as an invited editor for special issues of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (“Winter Limnology in a Changing World”) and Water Resources Research (“Response to Environmental Change in Aquatic Mountain Ecosystems”). His research seeks to understand how physical, chemical, and biological processes interact to shape the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. Much of his work is applied, examining how climate change, wildfire, and other human-driven stressors alter freshwater systems, with publications spanning lake metabolism, nutrient cycling, food web structure, wildfire smoke impacts, and long-term watershed dynamics. More information is available at https://sadrolab.squarespace.com.
Natalie van Doorn
Natalie S. van Doorn is a Research Urban Ecologist at the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. She holds bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley. Natalie is a member of the Science Advisory Panel of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, the Pacific Southwest Research (PSW) Natural Areas Committee, and the California Air Resources Board Greenspace & Health Project Community Advisory Group. Former advisory roles include the PSW’s Science Advisory Council, the Research Committee at the Los Angeles Center for Urban Natural Resources Sustainability, and Urban Tree Growth and Longevity Working Group which was affiliated with the Intentional Society of Arboriculture. Natalie studies urban and wildland forests, focusing on factors driving change, vulnerability to disturbances, and improving resilience. Currently, she co-leads a study of schoolyard trees in California elementary schools, in which the team is evaluating the cooling impacts of trees, resilience of current tree species to future climates, and tree management & maintenance issues. She is also a co-PI of the Climate Ready Trees study which is evaluating the ability of promising but underused species to tolerate changes in precipitation and temperature. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fbMG_5YAAAAJ&hl=en
Xiaoliang Wang
Dr. Xiaoliang Wang is a Research Professor in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Thermal Engineering and Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University, and earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Wang has served on technical advisory committees for the California Air Resources Board and the California South Coast Air Quality Management District, and previously chaired the Instrumentation Working Group and the Young Investigators Committee of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Atmosphere and the Editorial Advisory Board of Aerosol Science and Technology. He also serves as the Deputy Director of DRI’s Environmental Analysis Facility. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on the air quality, aerosols, air pollution sources, and instrument development. His work has been recognized with the AAAR Benjamin Y. H. Liu Award for outstanding contributions to aerosol instrumentation and experimental techniques, the DRI Science Medal, and the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) Regents' Mid-Career Researcher Award. https://www.dri.edu/directory/xiaoliang-wang/