David has been with the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) since 2003 as an Associate Research Scientist in Climatology. His professional interests cover a broad spectrum within the fields of climatology, meteorology, and physical geography including expertise in drought, mountain climatology, mountain geography, field-related campaigns collecting weather and climate data, instrumentation, Geographic Information Systems, and communicating scientific information to decision makers, stakeholders, media, and the public.
Leah Madison
Madison has spent 10 years in k-12 education program support, building broader impacts for a variety of scientific topics. She creates partnerships between scientists and community organizations to meet educational needs. Current research aims to increase the amount of co-production being used between stakeholders to improve applied sciences.
Stephanie McAfee
Dr. McAfee’s research is an applied climatologist with experience in analyzing both historical climate and projections of future climate and in applying that information to resource management and conservation questions. She has worked on questions ranging from bias propagation within coupled models to the production of downscaled snow projections for Alaska and has a strong interest in climate services and public outreach.
Douglas Boyle
Dr. Boyle is a watershed hydrologist with over 25 years of experience in the field of hydrology and water resources with an emphasis in the development, implementation, and evaluation of complex computer-based hydrologic models to simulate watershed response to precipitation (rainfall and snowmelt). Integrated computer-based modeling of hydrologic processes to understand the impacts of historic and future climate on water resources in arid and semi-arid environments using paleoclimate information (e.g., pluvial lake shore dating, tree ring records and other climate indicators), global climate model estimates (e.g., paleo, historic, and future precipitation and temperature estimates from both statistical and dynamically downscaled studies), and instrumental ground-based information (e.g., NWS Co-op data, NRCS SNOTEL data, and PRISM data sets). Additional research interests include streamflow forecasting, water leasing and banking, water markets, GIS, remote sensing, parameter estimation and uncertainty analysis, and automated multi-criteria optimization. Dr. Boyle is a former Director of the Nevada Water Resources Research Institute.
Franco Biondi
Prof. Franco Biondi received a Laurea (Italian Doctorate) in forestry from the Università di Firenze in 1985, and a Ph.D. in watershed management and geosciences from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1994. He is now a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is also the DendroLab Director, and a member of three interdisciplinary graduate programs: Environmental Sciences, Hydrologic Sciences, and Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology.
Together with his students and colleagues, he has conducted research projects in North America and Italy. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation (including a CAREER award in 2002-2008 and an EAGER award in 2012-2014), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Geographic Society.
Scott Bassett
Dr. Bassett is a conservation biologist and geographic information systems specialist with over 15 years experience in using computers to address environmental planning issues. He has extensive experience in spatial modeling, habitat modeling, landscape ecology, military installation encroachment issues, urban/natural environment boundary and in conservation reserve assessment and planning.
Thomas Albright
Thomas Albright employs landscape ecological and biogeographic perspectives to understand the causes and consequences of environmental change at local to global scales. His work has examined the role of climate and human dispersal in the spread of invasive plants in the US and China, the effects of extreme weather and disturbance on avian communities across the US, and the rate and patterns of land cover change and desertification in the West African Sahel. In his research and teaching, Dr. Albright employs a variety of remote sensing platforms, field data, GIS, spatial analysis, and hierarchical modeling. His remote sensing work has included inventories of glacier cover in the Himalaya using synthetic aperture radar, documenting the rise and fall of the world’s largest water hyacinth infestation in East Africa, and characterizing heat waves using thermal remote sensing. Dr. Albright has a long history of international research, applications, and teaching from over 15 countries and speaks French and Spanish proficiently.