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ESI Visiting Scholar
Deborah Cramer, author,
at Wingersheek Beach in Gloucester, MA.
© 2014 Shawn G. Henry
Deborah Cramer lives with her family at the edge of a salt marsh in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where each year she awaits the arrival of horseshoe crabs and alewives in tidal creeks, and the passage of migrating sandpipers and herons. She writes about science, nature, and the environment, and is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative.
Cramer has written three books, Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage, Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water Our World, and The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey. She has lectured about her writing and the sea on both sides of the Atlantic, at science and maritime museums, environmental and teachers’ organizations, and undergraduate and graduate schools in oceanography and journalism. Her writing has most recently appeared in Audubon, BBC Wildlife, the Boston Globe and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
The Narrow Edge has received the Best Book Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Reed Award in Environmental Writing from the Southern Environmental Law Center.
ESI Research Affiliate
Nick Obradovich is Senior Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in the Center for Humans and Machines. He previously worked as a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He is the Human-Environmental Systems Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is a research affiliate at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative. Nick lives in Oregon, USA.
Nick’s research combines his interests in artificial intelligence, climate change, and human behavior with his affinity for data science and computational methods. His work regularly appears in top academic journals and in major media outlets.
Nick’s climate research explores the human impacts of warming. He has uncovered climatic effects on mental health, mobility, mood, physical activity, and sleep as well as daily governance, democratic turnover, and civil conflict. He has also studied climate-related political behaviors, attitudes, and adaptation of expectations as well as the use of social media data to assess disaster damage and flood incidence.
ESI Research Affiliate
Juan Camilo Osorio is a PhD Candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). His teaching and research emphasize the tension between cities, inequality, and environmental conflict. His dissertation focuses on the political economy of long-term climate adaptation planning and disaster recovery in post-disaster Mocoa, Putumayo (Colombia)—a case study of social and environmental inequity, in the face of climate change impacts, landslides and avalanches.
He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment in New York City, where he introduces graduate students to urban planning research through technical assistance studios in partnership with grassroots planning partners. His teaching reflects on ten years of professional urban planning practice. While working as Director of Research for the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, he helped design policy and research on environmental and climate justice issues affecting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. He also worked as Senior Planner and Geographic Information Systems Analyst at The Municipal Art Society Planning Center, where he used spatial information to support research and advocacy on community-based planning, urban design and historic preservation. Before moving to New York, he worked with the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, a non-profit agency based in Holyoke, Massachusetts, using GIS to study systematic and procedural impediments to fair housing in the central and western regions of that state.
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