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People

Karen C. Seto, Ph.D
Karen Seto is a fellow at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP) within the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS) and an assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.
Her research focuses on the impacts of anthropogenic activity on spatio-temporal patterns of land use and land cover change. She uses a combination of remote sensing, socioeconomic data, and field surveys to monitor and model landscape dynamics. Her current research efforts include analyzing the effects of policy reforms on urbanization and agricultural expansion in China and Vietnam. She is the Remote Sensing Thematic Leader for the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Commission on Ecosystem Management, and is a recipient of the NASA New Investigator Program in Earth Science Award and the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.
She received her BA in Political Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara, her MA in International Relations, Resource and Environmental Management from Boston University, and her PhD in Geography from Boston University.

Margaret Pugh O’Mara
Margaret O’Mara received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Professor O’Mara’s research interests include: metropolitan growth and industrial suburbanization; universities and urban economic development; and politics and governance in the twentieth century North American West. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). Her current research explores comparative urbanizations and knowledge-economy development around the Pacific Rim. With Center faculty board member and Stanford professor Karen C. Seto (GES), she is leading a multi-year research project on the political, cultural, and economic drivers of urban growth in the “new Silicon Valleys” of India and China. Her Stanford courses include “California and the West in National Politics,” “Building Silicon Valley,” “The Suburban West,” and “Cities in the North American West, 1840-1940.” O'Mara previously served in the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a political aide and policy analyst, working on health care, welfare, and urban economic development programs.

Ruthie Harari-Kremer
Ruthie has been working with Dr. Karen Seto since November 2005 as the Lab Manager and Remote Sensing Analyst. Her interests focus on studying spatial-temporal land-use and land-cover changes and their effects on the environement, using remote sensing and GIS techniques.
Ruthie received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Environmental Biology from The Hebrew University, Israel. She completed a second Master degree in Environmental and Urban Geography, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in Remote Sensing and GIS.
Prior to Stanford, Ruthie has worked as a Remote Sensing and GIS Analyst for a consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. After she arrived with her family to California she worked as an Open Space Planner and GIS analyst for Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD).

Burak Guneralp, Ph.D.
Burak Guneralp is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences. His interests focus on the underlying causes of urban land use change and its impacts on the environment. His broader research interests include spatio-temporal analysis and modeling, socio-economic/socio-ecological management problems (in relation to sustainability), and formal analysis of structure-behavior relations in dynamic models.
Burak employs (spatial) dynamic modeling, statistical analysis and geographical information systems (GIS) to study the significance of social, economic and political drivers of urban land use change in China.
Burak received his BS and MS with specialization on System Dynamics from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey. He completed his Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michael Reilly, Ph.D.
Michael is a post-doctoral scholar in the Geological and Environmental Sciences department and the project manager of the Pacific Rim Suburbanization Project at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. His work centers on the interaction between cities and the natural environment through applications of urban modeling, transport planning, and spatial analysis. Currently he is comparing the suburbanization process and its environmental impacts in the Silicon Valley, the Pearl River Delta, and the Bangalore Metropolitan Area.
Michael grew up near Pasadena. He received his B.A. in anthropology, his Master of City Planning, and his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. During graduate school, Michael consulted in the public and private sectors and taught GIS and spatial analysis at the University of California and the California State University.

Alexander Boucher
Alexander is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. His research interests include geostatistics, remote sensing and probabilistic modeling of spatio-temporal phenomena.
Alexandre Boucher received a B. Eng. degree from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada, and a MPhil in mining geostatistics from University of Queensland, Australia.

Andrew Perlstein
Andrew is a graduate student in Stanford's Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. Prior to Stanford, he did a masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he focused on environment and development issues in China. He was supported by a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship to study Mandarin Chinese, an ongoing endeavor he started in college. Andrew has made several trips to mainland China, most recently to learn about conservation efforts in Yunnan Province. Before graduate school he worked in Yunnan, assisting a team of consultants to create a tourism development plan for the provincial government. He also spent some time in New York City (where is from originally) fundraising for an elementary school, volunteer teaching math for a non-profit adult education organization, and enjoying the reading room of the New York Public Library. Andrew's undergraduate degree is in Earth Sciences and Asian Studies from Dartmouth College.

Collin Cronkite-Ratcliff
Collin is an undergraduate student in Geological and Environmental Sciences. He is interested in geoinformatics with applications to remotely sensed data.
Collin has also worked as a research assistant in the Stanford Center for Reservoir Forecasting (SCRF) under an Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

 

 

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