Dr. Lynn Fenstermaker is an Emeritus faculty, and has experience and interests in the use of remotely sensed data to map, monitor, and assess the effect of environmental stressors on vegetation at small and large scales. She has served as Director of two NSHE climate change experiments; the Nevada Desert FACE (Free Air CO2 Enrichment) Facility and the Mojave Global Change Facility and is currently Director of the NV Climate-ecohydrological Assessment Network (NevCAN). All three of these projects have been examining various aspects of climate change impacts on the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts. Some of her recent research on evapotranspiration has scaled leaf and canopy measurements to plant community and ecosytem levels using remotely sensed data from ground, UAV and satellite sources. Dr. Fenstermaker is the DRI liaison for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and has worked with the University of Nevada Las Vegas to develop a Class I UAS platform. This platform has been used for several years to acquire multispectral and color images of research plots to assess climate change treatment effects and basic plant cover information.
Thomas Harris
Dr. Thomas Harris is a Foundation Professor in the Department of Economics in the College of Business, has a research appointment in Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station in the College Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources; State Extension Specialists in Community and Economic Development in the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension; and the Director of the University Center for Economic Development at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Harris has been at UNR since 1981 and his primary areas of teaching, research and extension are rural economic development, economic impact modeling, and local government finance. Dr. Harris’ research covers the economic and fiscal impacts of changes in public land grazing policies and surface water reallocations. Tom was co-editor of a published book titled Targeted Regional Economic Development, and, recently, worked on the Stronger Economies Together Project covering the Western Nevada Development District. Also Dr. Harris is a Fellow with the Western Rural Development Center.
Henry Sun
Henry Sun is an Assistant Research Professor Microbiology, Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at the Desert Research Institute, Las Vegas campus. His research areas of interest and expertise is life in extreme environments; endolithic microorganisms in the Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama Desert, and Death Valley; mineral formations in microbial environments; biological rock weathering, iron isotopic fractionation, and survival and adaptation in endolithic communities; new approaches to planetary life detection; and microbiology of compost tea making and its use as an alternative to fungicide in agriculture and viticulture.
Peter Weisberg
Dr. Weisberg is interested in the causes and consequences of landscape change, including natural disturbances, effects of anthropogenic land use, ungulate-landscape interactions, and invasive species. His research often considers past landscape change as a guide to understanding present and future condition, and integrates field studies, GIS, remote sensing and simulation modeling. Ongoing research projects within his lab group address disturbance ecology, woodland expansion, post-fire succession, and ecological restoration in Great Basin pinyon-juniper woodlands; fire history and ecology of mountain big sagebrush communities; fire ecology of the Sierra Nevada (Lake Tahoe Basin); and the ecology of tamarisk invasions along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon.
Lloyd Stark
The primary theme in my lab is the ecology of vegetative desiccation tolerance in plants. Desiccation tolerance (DT) is the ability of an organism or structure to survive drying out in equilibration with dry air, and among plants is most well developed among the bryophytes. In my lab, various species of mosses are cultured and bred, with experiments on DT normally based on single clonal lines. We are interested in determining the intrinsic ecological strategy of DT employed by a species; this strategy resides along an inducibility gradient, from weakly inducible to nearly constitutive. Experimental topics include the DT of vegetative and reproductive phases, the physiology and timelines of hardening and dehardening phenomena, how different life phases of mosses (shoots, asexual propagules, antheridia, juvenile structures) exhibit variation in response to desiccation stress, and the length of time structures can tolerate continuous desiccation. Specifically, my laboratory is investigating how the three components of desiccation tolerance, (i) the rate of drying, (ii) the duration spent in the dried state, and (iii) the equilibrium relative humidity reached, affect the capacity of a plant to tolerate desiccation. We focus on desert and Mediterranean mosses.
My graduate students are studying (i) the desiccation tolerance in Bryum argenteum life phases and hardening to DT in Physcomitrella and (ii) how the environment within the moss colony compares to the ambient environment, how this potential buffer varies along an elevation gradient in the desert, and including how this phenomenon relates to projected climate change.
Jeffery Shen
Dr. Shen’s research focuses on development of databases and bioinformatics tools for genome analyses and gene annotations, predictions of genes responsive to environmental/developmental cues, and predictions of gene functions (subcellular localization, and protein motifs). Another focus of my research is the molecular mechanism controlling plant responses to abiotic stresses, seed dormancy and germination. He is also interested in the mechanism underlying tissue-specific and developmentally-regulated gene expression.
The recent accomplishment in sequencing the genomes of thousands of organisms, including human being and important crops such as rice, is leading to a revolution in scientific research, medicine discovery, and improvement of the quality of our food. His lab is interested in developing (adopting, modifying, and inventing) bioinformatics tools for genome analyses and gene ontology studies. Gene ontology addresses: Biological Process (Why is this, such as cell enlargement, being done?), Molecular Function (What kind of molecule is this? Enzymes or transcription factors?), and Cellular Component (Where is this located? Nuclei or Mitochondria?).
Sudeep Chandra
Dr. Sudeep Chandra is an Associate Professor, Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. His laboratory conducts limnological studies related to the restoration or conservation of aquatic ecosystems. His projects include recovering native species, managing nonnative species, understanding the affects of land use change (mining, urbanization, etc) on water quality, and developing natural resource management & conservation plans for the world’s largest, freshwater fishes. We recognize that science is critical in developing longer-term, sustainable public policy.
Brian Hedlund
Dr. Brian Hedlund is a Professor in Life Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hedlund’s research focuses on the microbiology and biogeochemistry of geothermal ecosystems, the genomic exploration of “microbial dark matter”, and the role of the intestinal microbiome in prevention of Clostridium difficile infection. Dr. Hedlund is editor for Antonie van Leeuwenhoek journal, a member of Bergey’s Manual Trust, and editor for Bergey’s Manual of Systematics of Archaea and Bacteria, the authoritative reference manual for microbial taxonomy.
Christie Howard
Director, BS/MS Biotechnology Program
David Charlet
Dr. Charlet’s research concerns the natural history of arid regions. His studies focus on the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, a region that includes most of Nevada and some of each of the surrounding states. Most of his research involves how plants are distributed across landscapes and regions.