Project Team

Rafael Almeida

Rafael is a sustainability scientist motivated by the challenge of providing energy, water, and food to a growing human population in a fast-changing world. Having a background in aquatic sciences, his work largely revolves around balancing benefits and socioenvironmental costs of water infrastructure and managed aquatic ecosystems. Greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are common threads in his research. Currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, he is especially interested in hydropower and aquaculture.

Héctor Angarita

Héctor Angarita is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University. His research focuses on the linkages between freshwater ecosystems functions and services, climate variability, and production and demand of water-dependent resources—such as energy and biomass. Héctor received his Ph.D. in Environmental and Rural Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia in 2018. In his PhD work, he developed cross-scale methods for characterizing regional interdependencies and cumulative impacts between the production and demand of energy and biomass, and basin-scale processes and services of the freshwater system in Colombia. He holds an M.Sc. in Hydrosystems from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia; and a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Rich Bernstein

Rich Bernstein is an IT and programmer/analyst in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, IT and program coordinator for the Cornell University AI for Science Institute (CUAISci) and the Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS), and project coordinator and IT manager for the Computational Sustainability Network (CompSustNet). He develops software and computational methods and prepares data sets for different scientific applications related to sustainability. He has worked on a variety of projects, including the interpretation of crystal structure data from materials science experiments looking for battery and fuel cell catalysts, and solar fuels; understanding movement patterns of pastoralists in East Africa, their water and forage resource use, and estimation of related environmental conditions from satellite imagery; and the design of wildlife conservation corridors. He is particularly interested in applications related to renewable energy and power systems.

Alexander Flecker

Alex Flecker is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University and a freshwater ecosystem ecologist with more than 35 years of experience working in tropical South America. His research themes include understanding the role of biodiversity in shaping aquatic ecosystems, fish and fisheries biology, ecosystem consequences of invasive species, sustainability science, and human impacts on aquatic ecosystems and their ecosystem services. He is keenly interested in tradeoffs involving complex sustainability challenges, including hydropower expansion and aquaculture in the Amazon Basin.

Ayan Fleischmann

Ayan Fleischmann is an interdisciplinary hydrologist, working with tropical hydrology and sustainable development of wetlands, especially in the Amazon region. He holds an Environmental Engineering degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and a PhD in Water Resources and Environmental Sanitation from UFRGS and Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (France). He is currently a full researcher and leader of the Research Group on Geosciences and Environmental Dynamics in the Amazon, at the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development. His research focuses on understanding the hydrology and climate of tropical wetlands, and the impacts of past, current, and future climate and environmental changes on social-ecological systems associated with riverscapes. He also coordinates the “Conexões Amazônicas” network for science outreach related to the Amazon (https://conexoesamazonicas.org/).

Carla Gomes

Carla Gomes is a Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Her research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. Computational Sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field, with the overarching goal of studying and providing solutions to computational problems for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future.

Laura Greenstreet

Laura Greenstreet is a PhD student in Cornell's Department of Computer Science working with Dr. Carla Gomes. Her research focuses on combining AI and optimization with applications in ecology and sustainability. Her research interests include multi-objective optimization, interpretable deep learning, and remote sensing.

Marc Grimson

Marc Grimson is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Cornell University. For his research, Marc’s work focuses on optimization and modeling in the context of environmental sustainability and biological conservation problems, including strategic energy planning in large river basins and modeling of joint species distributions of bird populations across the globe using citizen science data, working across the spectrum of AI from standard optimization techniques to deep learning modeling. Prior to beginning his Ph.D. program, Marc received his BS in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and spent seven years as a software engineer and software architect in the private sector working on real-time fraud detection and prevention.

Guido A. Herrera-R

Guido completed his B.Sc. at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and an M.Sc. in Modeling of Ecological Systems from the University of Toulouse, France. Guido is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His dissertation looks to understand the functional drivers of freshwater biodiversity responses to global environmental change. Guido uses data science and synthesis tools to leverage global databases of fish surveys, environmental datasets (climate, flow, and land covers), and species traits. He aims to gain insights into the complex ecological processes that drive freshwater biodiversity loss, especially in the tropics, and develop more effective conservation strategies to protect it.

Sebastian Heilpern

Sebastian Heilpern is an ecologist and sustainability scientist focusing on understanding the causes and consequences of biodiversity change. He is particularly interested in the intersection between aquatic ecosystems, fisheries and food security. Born to two Latino immigrants, he grew up between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Brooklyn, NY. Currently a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Heilpern received a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Biology from Columbia University, an M.S. from the University of Chicago, and has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society for over 10 years on issues related to freshwater conservation in the Amazon.

Marcela Miranda

Marcela Miranda is a Brazilian scientist interested in the sustainability of freshwater ecosystems. She has expertise in eutrophication of aquatic environments, mitigation of cyanobacterial blooms and biogeochemical cycles. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher in Earth System Science at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University (USA, NY), working in an interdisciplinary group that seeks to find ways toward a sustainable future for society living in the different Brazilian biomes. Her research goal seeks to address contemporary environmental issues such as global changes and the water-energy-food nexus.

Andrés Mauricio Munar

PhD in Water Resources and Environmental Health from the Hydraulic Research Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (IPH/UFRGS). During my Master’s Degree and my PhD I worked with large-scale hydrological /hydrodynamic modeling and remote sensing, developing Fortran/MatLab-based codes capable of describing lake/watershed processes and water quality modeling in these environments. These works have been recent published in Journal of Hydrology, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Science of The Total Environment, Brazilian Journal of Water Resources and Water from MDPI. My courses have covered a wide range of topics related not only to large-scale hydrology but also Water Resources Management, Hydraulic and GIS. Also, I have participated in various courses, workshops and conferences in both, local and international coverage.

Felipe Pacheco

Felipe Pacheco is an ecologist interested in interdisciplinary research that focuses on exploring feasible alternatives to support the transition to a sustainable future. Dr. Pacheco received his Ph.D. from the Earth System Science Center of the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil. His work is centered around the following question: “how to ensure water, energy and food security in the future under the increasing demand for natural resources and climate change?” His current research as a Schmidt Science Fellow at Cornell University seeks to identify how expanding aquaculture can contribute to sustainable and nutritious food systems in the Amazon Basin.

Rafael Schmitt

Rafael Schmitt is Lead Scientist at the Natural Capital Project and Senior Research Engineer at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Rafael’s work focuses on the role of natural and built infrastructure for the water-energy-food nexus, with an emphasis on large rivers. Rafael’s interdisciplinary research uses a wide range of numerical methods, from graph theory to machine learning, to support strategic environmental decision-making. Previously, Rafael was a postdoc at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Environmental Science and Engineering from ETH Zurich.

Suresh Sethi

Suresh A. Sethi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources & the Environment, and member of the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Cornell University. Suresh works at the interface of quantitative science, ecological, and socioeconomic disciplines to advance marine and freshwater fisheries sustainability. His research portfolio is multidisciplinary, including development of novel statistical tools for ecology, fisheries management science, and socioecological systems assessments. Prior to joining Cornell, he worked as the Alaska Region biometrician for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and spent a stint as a commercial fisherman. Suresh earned an M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Washington. In addition to his faculty appointment at Cornell, he is a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for a Sustainability, a University Fellow at Ulster University, and Affiliate Faculty at Alaska Pacific University.

Steven Thomas

Steve Thomas is the Bishop Professor of Freshwater Biology and the Director of the Center for Freshwater Studies at the University of Alabama. Dr. Thomas is a stream ecologist with expertise in biogeochemistry, particulate carbon transport, ecosystem metabolism, food web interactions and the interactions between ecology and hydrology. Dr. Thomas has conducted research in Trinidad, Ecuador, and Brazil, as many sites across North America . His current work focuses on the transport and transformation of particles and solutes in lotic ecosystems from microbial to network scales.

Andrew Wilcox

Andrew Wilcox studies and teaches about landscape processes and their relationship to ecosystems, restoration, and watershed management. His specific research interests include geomorphic responses to dam construction and removal; the effects of wildfire, floods, and other climate-driven events on rivers; and the nexus of water and energy systems, especially with respect to both the clean-energy transition and analysis of sediment regimes and hydropower. In 2023 and 2024, he is teaching a 10-day graduate course in Colombia, Rivers of the Andes Field Training.