Appendix B
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
James L. Wescoat, Chair, is the Aga Khan Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was previously the head of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a professor in the Department of Geography, University of Colorado. His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the United States from the site to river basin scales. He has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins, including the history of multilateral water agreements. He is currently conducting comparative international research on water hazards and conservation innovations in the United States, South Asia, and Central Asia. Dr. Wescoat has served on and chaired several NRC Committees, most recently the Committee on Himalayan Glaciers, Climate Change, and Implications for Downstream Populations. He received his B.L.A. degree in landscape architecture from Louisiana State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in geography from the University of Chicago.
Ximing Cai is an associate professor and Ven Te Chow Faculty Scholar in Water Resources in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before joining UIUC, he worked as a joint research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Water Management Institute. His current research areas include water-energy system analysis, coupled human-natural systems modeling, and sustainable infrastructure system analysis. In particular he has been conducting integrated hydrological-ecological-economic modeling analysis for large-scale river basins, address-
ing the interactions and coevolution of human and natural systems, and providing policy implications for sustainable river basin management in the United States and around the world. Dr. Cai has worked as a consultant to the World Bank, the United Nations, and the OECD to solve international water resources management problems. He holds a Ph.D. degree in civil dngineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ben R. Hodges is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of interest are in the fields of environmental fluid mechanics and surface water hydraulics; coupled field and model investigations of hydrodynamics in lakes, rivers, and estuaries; relationships between river hydraulics and instream flow for aquatic habitat; and linkages between water quality and hydrodynamics in natural systems. His recent research has focused on hydrodynamic and transport modeling of the stratification in Corpus Christi Bay, which impacts episodic hypoxia development. He was a member of the NRC Committee to Review the St. Johns River Water Supply Impact Study. Dr. Hodges received his B.S. degree in marine engineering and nautical science from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, his M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from George Washington University, and his Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from Stanford University.
Samantha B. Joye is the Athletic Association Professor of Arts & Sciences in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. Her research program encompasses multiple fields of study, including biogeochemistry and microbial community structure and potential metabolic activity in coastal environments. In particular, she has focused on the cycling of nutrients, dissolved gases, trace metals, carbon, and sulfur in a variety of systems, ranging from saline lakes to temperate and tropical coastal environments to deep ocean sediments and brines to Antarctic lakes and Arctic seas. She has also studied how coastal ecosystems (in such regions as Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Massachusetts, as well as mangrove forests in Florida, Belize, and Panama) respond to global change and various natural and anthropogenic forcing functions. Finally she has been involved in determining how microbial and geochemical processes have responded to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon incident. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina.
G. Mathias Kondolf is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. His research concerns human-river interactions broadly, with emphasis on management of flood-prone lands, sediment management in reservoirs and regulated river channels, and river restora-
tion. Dr. Kondolf is currently analyzing cumulative sediment trapping from construction of proposed dams in the lower Mekong River basin and organizing a workshop on sediment starvation impacts on the Mekong delta. He is evaluating current riparian restoration efforts in the lower Colorado River and in the Klamath River basin. As Clarke Scholar at the Institute for Water Resources of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he launched a review of nonstructural approaches to floodplain management, and he formerly served on the Environmental Advisory Board to the Chief of the Corps. He was also on the Science Board for the CALFED Bay-Delta Ecosystem Restoration Program. Dr. Kondolf served on the NCR Committee on Further Studies of Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River. He received his A.B. degree in geology from Princeton University, his M.S. degree in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. degree in geography and environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
William M. Lewis, Jr., is professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, director of the Center for Limnology, and associate director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests, as reflected in over 200 journal articles and books, include productivity and other metabolic aspects of aquatic ecosystems, aquatic food webs, composition of biotic communities, nutrient cycling, and the quality of inland waters. Dr. Lewis has worked not only in North America but also on tropical aquatic ecosystems of Latin America and Southeast Asia. His current research projects include use of models to estimate global primary production (carbon fixation) of lakes, nutrient regulation of algal populations in inland waters, and nitrogen cycling in inland waters. Dr. Lewis has served as a member or chair of numerous NRC committees; he was chair of the Committee on Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin, the Committee on Glen Canyon Environmental Studies Review, and the Committee on Wetlands Characterization. He received his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University.
Leonard A. Shabman is a Resident Scholar at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. He previously was a professor of agriculture and applied economics in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dr. Shabman’s professional interests include economics, water resources, policy analysis, resource planning, wetlands, and pollution control. He also has served as an economic adviser to the (former) federal Water Resources Council and as scientific adviser to the assistant secretary of the army, Civil Works. Dr. Shabman is a past member of the NRC Water Science and Technology Board and has chaired several NRC committees, including the Committee on the Missouri River
Recovery and Associated Sediment Management Issues, the Committee to Assess the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Methods of Analysis and Peer Review for Water Resources Project Planning, and the Committee on Mitigating Wetland Losses. Dr. Shabman received his Ph.D. degree in agricultural economics from Cornell University.
Eelco van Beek is a water resources specialist in the Netherlands, where he splits his time between three organizations. First, he is a part-time professor in the field of modelling integrated water resources management at the University of Twente where he is leading two multiparty research projects: (1) freshwater supply in delta areas under climate change and (2) perspectives in water management, aiming to integrate social/institutional and technical aspects in decision making under uncertainty. Second, he is a water resources management specialist at Deltares, where he is involved in the new Delta Plan for the Netherlands and participating as integrated water resources management expert in several delta projects around the world, in particular the Mekong, Ganges/Megna, and Ciliwung/Jakarta. Finally, for the Global Water Partnership he is presently involved in a scientific background paper on water security. He has been actively involved in many water resources development projects in the Netherlands and abroad, ranging from projects with emphasis on long-term planning to real-time operation, from projects aimed at pre-feasibility studies to detailed water management projects, and from integrated studies (water quantity, water quality, ecology, economics, socioeconomics, and institutional aspects) to single-aspect studies. He received his M.Sc. degree in civil engineering, cum laude, Delft University of Technology.
