Climate at Vanderbilt

Mariah Caballero is a fourth-year Doctoral Student in Vanderbilt University’s Community Research and Action program. She also contributes research to the Drinking Water Justice Lab and serves as a Research and Development Intern for Sandia National Laboratories. Previous to her time at Vanderbilt, Mariah received bachelor’s degrees in biology and geography from Vassar College. After working at the Centers for Disease Control, Mariah was employed as a data analyst for the United States Environmental Protection Agency ’s Office of Research and Development , in the Drinking Water Management Branch.

Brooke Ackerly is a Professor of Political Science with secondary appointments in the Law School and Peabody School. She studies political theory and is currently working on the intersection of global economic, environmental, and gender justice. She has been on the editorial boards of Politics and Gender and is the founder and principal investigator of the Global Feminisms Collaborative.

In this episode our guest is Dr. Calynn Dowler. She is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies whose research and expertise lies at the intersection of religious studies and environmental anthropology. She received her BA in Political Science and German from Gettysburg College, her Masters of Migration Studies from the University of Sussex, and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University.

Kip Viscusi is a University Distinguished Professor with appointments in the Department of Economics, the Law School, and the Owen Graduate School of Management. He is also Co-Director of the Law & Economics program, in which students receive a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Law & Economics. His work focuses on risk analysis and benefit-cost analysis and has been influential in shaping government policies, including on the social cost of carbon, and the field of law and economics generally.

Dr. Patrick Greiner received his PhD in Sociology from University of Oregon in 2018, and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies here at Vanderbilt. He is also a Dean’s Faculty Fellow of Vanderbilt’s Grand Challenge in Climate and Society. Professor Greiner’s research centers on providing greater insight into the complex co-constitution of social inequalities, environmental changes, and their consequences.

Dr. Charles Doktycz is a Climate Risk and Resilience Analyst for Argonne National Laboratory. He received his BS in Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University, focusing on climate change and the cost of inaction due to the rising threats of extreme weather. He has a range of interests and experience in climate change issues, including climate modeling, community resilience development, risk analysis, and international environmental law.

Dr. Yolanda J. McDonald is an Assistant Professor in the  Department of Human and Organizational Development and a Faculty Affiliate on Vanderbilt's Program in Climate and Environmental Studies. Dr. McDonald is also the Lead Investigator of the Vanderbilt University Drinking Water Justice Lab. She  earned her M.A. in Sociology from the University of Texas at El Paso, and her Ph.D. in Geography from Texas A&M University, focusing on healthcare access inequities. Building on that theme, she is currently a National Institutes of Health, Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar.

Bruce Jennings, M.A., is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, and he is Senior Fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature, a nonprofit research center based in Chicago that studies environmental ethics and policy. He came to Vanderbilt from the Yale University School of Public Health, where he taught ethics from 1996-2014. He also is Senior Advisor at The Hastings Center, where he served from 1991 through 1999 as Executive Director. In this episode we discuss his career and why his research has expanded from biomedical ethics to the ethical dimensions of climate change in recent years.

Mike Vandenbergh is a David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law, Director of Vanderbilt's Climate Change Research Network, and Co-Director of the Law School's Program on Energy, Environment, and Land Use Law. He teaches courses in environmental law, climate change justice, and property, and has been a visiting professor at the Wharton School’s Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law Schools. His research focuses on working with interdisciplinary teams to explore environmental governance, environmental behavior, and climate change. His research has developed the concept of private environmental governance and explored how private governance initiatives can address polarization and other barriers to climate change mitigation. In this episode we discuss several of these initiatives, with more to follow in future episodes.

Caroline Cox joined Vanderbilt Law School as the program director for the Energy, Environment and Land Use Program and a member of the adjunct law faculty in 2022. Immediately before joining Vanderbilt's EELU faculty and staff, Caroline was a law clerk to Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. After earning her law degree at Harvard, she was a law clerk for Chief Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. In addition to teaching a course on Sustainable Cities, Caroline advises students interested in careers in environmental law and oversees the EELU Program’s white-paper series. In this episode we discuss her background and her perspectives on climate change law and policy.