Two new UW-Madison faculty members will join the Nelson Institute and its Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) in August: Annemarie Schneider and Mutlu Ozdogan. Schneider will work full time here, while Ozdogan will split his time equally with the Department of Forest Ecology and Management.
“Both hires will add tremendous expertise in SAGE’s mission of understanding the links between global environmental change, natural resources, and human well being,” says center director Jon Foley.
Schneider is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Institute for Computational Earth System Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her B.S. in geography from UW-Madison and her M.A. and Ph.D. in geography and environmental science from Boston University. Her research interests include land cover change, urban geography, the urban environment, and the human dimensions of global environmental change.
Schneider’s work focuses on transforming the study of urban areas from local investigation to one of comparative analysis in support of global change research. She leads the 40 Cities Project, an effort to compare and contrast the rates, patterns, and socioeconomic drivers of land use change in a global cross-section of metropolitan areas. Her work also includes mapping urban land-surface properties globally using a fusion of remote sensing data types to help better model the impacts of urbanization on the regional and global environment. Grants from NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the World Bank have funded her research.
Ozdogan is a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He has a B.Sc. in geological engineering from Istanbul University in Turkey, an M.Sc. in geology from North Carolina State University, and an M.A. in environmental remote sensing and Ph.D. in geography and environment from Boston University.
His research focuses on land-use/land-cover conversion and climate change impacts on the global water and energy cycles and how they interact with ecosystem goods and services that are important to human well being. He is also interested in improving the information content of satellite observations through algorithm and model development.
While in Boston, Ozdogan worked at BU’s Center for Remote Sensing on projects related to water resource scarcity and satellite-assisted methods to search for additional water resources in the Middle East. He is currently developing a dataset on global irrigation extent with the help of satellite observations. This dataset, in conjunction with irrigation water use models, is used to assess irrigation feedback on climate and the sustainability of agricultural water resources that, by extension, affect global food security and human vulnerability. His research has been supported by grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Welcome, Annemarie and Mutlu!