Hosting Organization: 
University Consortium Partners
Reed Maxwell, Colorado School of Mines Director
Dr. Reed Maxwell is the Director of the Integrated Ground Water Modeling Center (IGWMC) and an Associate Professor in the Geology and Geologic Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines. His research interests are focused on hydrology, particularly scientific questions relating to understanding connections within the hydrologic cycle and how they relate to water quantity and quality. He teaches classes on integrated hydrology, fluid mechanics and modeling terrestrial water flow. He leads a research group of twelve graduate students and two postdoctoral researchers housed in the IGWMC at CSM. Before joining the faculty at Mines, Dr. Maxwell was staff in the Hydrologic Sciences group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and he holds a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Water Resources from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Christopher Anderson, Iowa State University Director
Dr. Christopher J. Anderson is a Research Assistant Professor at Iowa State University in the Agronomy Department and Assistant Director of the Climate Science Initiative, an Iowa State University research program that provides authoritative, scientific information for short-term and long-term decision-making. Mr. Anderson’s research examines how climate variability relates to the hydrological cycle and water resources. He has worked closely with water resource managers in the western United States to incorporate climate information into water resource management tools. He recently participated in the EPA-sponsored climate adaptation pilot project for which he coauthored the Iowa Climate Change Adaptation & Resilience Report. His current research examines the heavy rainfall regimes across the central United States, the likelihood that these regimes will change in the future, and ways to incorporate information about expected regime changes into resource management. He received his Ph. D in agricultural meteorology from Iowa State University.
John Briggs, Kansas State University & Arizona State University Director
Dr. John Briggs is a Professor of Plant Biology at Arizona State University and adjunct Professor of Biology at Kansas State University. He is the director of the Konza Prairie Biological Station, through the Long Term Ecology Research (LTER) network, which focuses on grazing and climatic variability in grasslands worldwide. He is also the author of more than 40 publications. His research focuses on plant ecology and the role of fire, grazing on grasslands, the expansion of woody vegetation into grasslands, landscape ecology, the influence of humans on ecosystems, the use of remote sensing and geographical information systems in ecology research; and ecological data managing. He is currently working on the causes and consequences of dramatic shifts in growth form dominance in certain ecosystems. John received his Ph. D in Zoology, University of Arkansas.
Cathy Whitlock, Montana State University Director
Dr. Cathy Whitlock is a Professor of Earth Sciences at Montana State University and has built a successful research and teaching program as well as involvement in the Paleoecology Lab. She is also the Director of the institute on Ecosystems (IOE) and Lead Investigator on NSF Wildfire Partnership in Research and Education (Wildfire PIRE). Her research interests include quaternary climate change, environmental history of the Northern Rockies and Yellowstone, the role of people and climate change in shaping fire regimes in the western US, Patagonia, Tasmania, and New Zealand as well as using science to inform management and decision making. Cathy also currently sits on national and an international advisory committee concerned with climate change and has published over 140 reviewed journal articles. Cathy received her Ph.D. in geological Sciences from the University of Washington.
Bob Oglesby, University of Nebraska Director
Robert ‘Bob’ Oglesby is a Professor of Climate Modeling at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, with joint appointments in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Natural Resources. Bob’s research interests include the causes of drought, the impact of deforestation on climate, and key mechanisms of climate change, both past and future. He has authored or co-authored over 100 refereed journal papers and book chapters on these subjects. Bob is also currently involved with in-country training in the development and use of high-resolution climate change models for vulnerability and impacts studies in Central America and Asia. He received his PH. D. in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from Yale University.
William Lauenroth, University of Wyoming Director
William Lauenroth is a professor of ecology and botany at the University of Wyoming. His research interests include ecosystems in dry areas, specifically grassland. He is currently on the Shortgrass Steppe Long Term Ecological Research, testing controls on shrub-grass interactions in cool temperate ecosystems. He is also currently involved with response of sagebrush-conifer ecco-tone to a mountain pine beetle epidemic and climate change. A portion of his research has focused on plant population and community ecology. Within these general topics, his students and he has worked on demography, controls on recruitment, resource partitioning between grasses and woody plants, responses to and recovery from disturbance ranging from small to large spatial scale including grazing by domestic livestock. Another branch of the research his students and he has conducted falls within the realm of ecosystem ecology and has included above and belowground net primary production, carbon budgets, and water balance. He uses simulation modeling as a key exploratory and analysis tool across all of the organizational and spatial scales of his research. He received his Ph.D. in Range Science at Colorado State University.
Kristen Averyt, NOAA Consortium Leader
Kristen is the Deputy Director for the Western Water Assessment (RISA), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA-sponsored Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment (RISA) Programs. Her research team focuses on developing climate science relevant to decision makers throughout the Western US. Her research interests include renewable energy technologies, water availability, and climate change in the West as well as evaluating decision-making in the context of climate adaptation and defining processes for engaging users in the development of climate services. She is also involved with paleo-climate research, which is related to her dissertation work. She received her PhD Geological & Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, 2004 and well as a master as a Fulbright fellow at the University of Otago (New Zealand), 1999 Kristen has received several awards and honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship to New Zealand in 1998. After graduate school she was awarded a NOAA Knauss Congressional Fellowship (2005), during which she worked in the US Senate. As the staff scientist for Working Group I of the IPCC, she was one of the many scientists who received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
