SPEAKERS
Dr. David DeCosse
David DeCosse is Director of Campus Ethics Programs at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. He has been at the Ethics Center since 2002.
As Director of Campus Ethics Programs, he has worked to put on a wide variety of public events on campus; worked extensively with undergraduate student fellows on projects in applied ethics; managed the Ethics Center's research grant program; and worked more broadly on campus on topics ranging from academic integrity to ethics in student government to the hookup culture to engineering ethics to environmental ethics and more. Recently, he organized a major conference at Santa Clara University on Laudato Si, the encyclical on the environment by Pope Francis.
He teaches such classes as the Ethics of War and Peace, Christianity and Politics, and the Theology and Ethics of Thomas Aquinas. A Catholic theologian, he is especially interested in the intersection of Catholic theology with contemporary democratic culture. He has written articles for the journal Theological Studies on lying and the Iraq War; freedom of the press and the Catholic sexual abuse crisis; and freedom of speech and the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He has edited or co-edited a number of books, including But Was It Just: Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War and Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism in the United States: The Challenge of Becoming a Church for the Poor.
Recently, he has been publishing essays on the theology of conscience in places ranging from National Catholic Reporter to the book called From Vatican II to Pope Francis: Charting a Catholic Future. He is the co-editor of the book Conscience and Catholicism: Rights, Responsibilities, and Institutional Responses and is slated to edit a second, similar volume called Conscience and Catholic Health Care: From Clinical Contexts to Government Mandates. Both of these conscience books emerged from conferences hosted by the Ethics Center. DeCosse is writing a book called Catholicism and the Equality of Freedom: An Essay in Social Ethics. He has written widely for journalistic outlets ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Philadelphia Inquirer to Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
He is a graduate of Harvard College and of the doctoral program in theological ethics at Boston College.
Before joining Santa Clara University School of Law, Professor Yang served as Deputy General Counsel of the US Environmental Protection Agency. In that capacity, he provided legal counsel to the EPA Administrator and other senior Agency leaders and supervised legal work on international and domestic environmental issues.
Prior to his EPA appointment, Professor Yang was a tenured member of the Vermont Law School faculty and also taught law at the University of Pittsburgh, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. From 2007 to 2010, he led the establishment of the US-China Partnership for Environmental Law, a US AID and State Department-funded initiative to build China’s institutional capacity in environmental law and governance. Besides teaching and research in the field, Professor Yang has trained and advised many foreign governments and international organizations on environmental law and governance issues. He served for four years on EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
In 2009, the American Bar Association honored Professor Yang as a Distinguished Environmental Advocate. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law.
Before law teaching, Professor Yang served as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, practiced law with the firm of Latham and Watkins in San Francisco, and was a law clerk for the Honorable Rudi M. Brewster of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. He received his BA degree magna cum laude in biochemistry from Harvard University and his JD degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
In his spare time, Professor Yang enjoys spending time with his family, serving as his dog’s social secretary, and exploring local eateries. He believes that he was a gardener in a previous life time.
Education
J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Harvard University
Tseming Yang, J.D.
Andra Yeghoian, MBA
Andra is a seasoned educator with over a decade of private and public school experience in administration, classroom teaching, curriculum and instruction design, facilitation, professional development, and project management. She has a BA in International Relations and a Teaching Credential from UC Davis, and an MBA in Sustainable Systems from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
Andra currently serves as the Director of Sustainability at Bishop O'Dowd High School, in Oakland, CA. Her passions center around personal and organizational learning, and facilitating the journey for others in becoming self-aware, systems thinking, change agents.
Edwin Maurer, Ph.D., P.E.
Professor, Civil Engineering Department, Santa Clara University
Ed Maurer holds a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University
of Rhode Island, a Masters in Civil Engineering from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington.
Following 18 years of various consulting and research work, he joined Santa Clara University’s Civil Engineering department in 2003, where he teaches courses in hydraulics, hydrology, water resources, GIS, and sustainability. His professional experience includes work in municipal water supply and wastewater engineering, climate change impacts, western tribal water rights, and rural community water supply projects in Latin America. His recent research contributions involve modeling large scale hydrologic dynamics, improving long-lead forecasting, and studying regional impacts of climate change, especially on water. He has published numerous reports and peer-reviewed journal articles on assessing the impact of climate change on water resources from river basin to regional scales.
Dr. Edwin Maurer
Dr. John S. Farnsworth
Dr. Farnsworth serves jointly as Provost’s Faculty Associate for Curriculum Development and Transformation and Senior Lecturer for Environmental Studies and Sciences at Santa Clara University. He holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he concentrated on Literary Natural History. He has also been awarded an MLA(interdisciplinary studies in the liberal arts, concentrating on environmental rhetoric) from Stanford University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University (concentration on nature writing.) He teaches broadly in the environmental humanities, offering a range of courses including: Nature and Imagination, Analyzing Green Rhetoric, Environmental Thought, and Writing Natural History.
Dr. Farnsworth has been involved in Sustainability Across the Curriculum since 2006, and has trained faculty in this pedagogy from more than 60 colleges and universities. He was the first to offer a workshop on Education Across the Curriculum in Europe, and served as one of the inaugural faculty fellows for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. His research is broadly interdisciplinary, extending from literary natural history to studying the culture of biological field stations to engaging in environmental philosophy. He is a member of the Board of Editors for the Journal of Natural History Education and Experience, and long-term volunteer with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory.
Dr. Elizabeth Berkes
Dr. Elizabeth Berkes has served as the Vice Principal for Faculty Development at De La Salle High School in Concord for four years. In that role she has primary responsibility for overseeing, and coordinating all aspects of supervision, evaluation, and professional development for a faculty of over 70 full and part-time teachers. Dr. Berkes is also De La Salle High School’s accreditation coordinator. Her previous work involved working with the Validation Committee for the Common Core and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Dr. Berkes has maintained a lifelong interest and involvement in working with the poor and marginalized through various secular and Catholic organizations. She is delighted to collaborate with RISK participants on the topic of Laudato Si and the promotion of environmental sustainability.
Dr. Brian Patrick Green
Brian Patrick Green is assistant director of campus ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and adjunct lecturer in the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University, California. He holds a B.S. in genetics from the University of California, Davis, worked briefly in molecular biology and biotechnology, then joined the Jesuit Volunteers International to teach high school in the Marshall Islands. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are in ethics and social theory from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, where his dissertation was on updating Catholic natural law ethics. His teaching and publishing interests focus on the ethics of technology, particularly environmental ethics, the ethics of space exploration and use, the ethics of existential risk, the cognitive science of the virtues, and the ethics of radical human enhancement (transhumanism).
He is co-author of a teaching module on the ethics of Laudato Si, and recently completed teaching an undergraduate course on the encyclical which brought together many professors as guest speakers.
Bill Sundstrom
William A. Sundstrom is Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University. He is the author of numerous scholarly publications in economics and economic history. His current research focuses on the impact of climate change and poverty in developing countries as well as the causes and consequences of poverty and income inequality in the Silicon Valley region. He teaches courses in econometrics, environmental economics, and the economics of race and gender.
Recent research projects include the causes and effects of public libraries in the United States, patterns of poverty in the Silicon Valley region and the effectiveness of local antipoverty initiatives, and determinants of food insecurity in rural Central America.
He has published articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Information and Culture, and Global Environmental Change. He is co-editor of the book, History Matters: Essays on Economic Growth, Technology, and Demographic Change (Stanford University Press).
Dr. Iris Stewart-Frey
Associate Professor, Department Chair
Ph.D., Stanford University
My teaching vision is to engage and inspire every student in my class to become an active learner. I believe that if students have a solid foundation in the basics, a keen interest, and knowledge on how they learn best, they are well equipped to learn in the classroom and well beyond. I strive to kindle this interest, provide foundational knowledge in Environmental Studies and Sciences, and have students explore their learning preferences through a variety of teaching strategies, such as discussions, research projects, student presentations, workshops, fieldwork, case studies, and traditional lectures. In my classes we explore the geological, atmospheric, water, and soil processes and their interactions with society, pondering how plate tectonics is relevant for cell phones, why more than half of the world's population today does not have access to the quality of water systems available to the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago, and how in 200 years we have managed to lose half of the topsoil of the Great Plains, which took hundreds or thousands of years to form. I also teach Geographical Information Systems (GIS), an approach to mapping and spatial analysis, which is used in many academic and professional fields. In the class, students conduct a research project using GIS. Several longer term student projects, such as vegetative mapping at the Blue Oak Ranch and Reserve and an investigation into food access and environmental justice issues in Santa Clara County have evolved from this classwork.
My research interests encompass environmental issues that affect the water cycle and water supply. I have worked on both shallow groundwater pollution issues and on surface water processes that are related to climate variability and climate change.
Fr. Steve Kim
Fr. Steve Kim grew up in Palo Alto and entered seminary after high school. He studied at Santa Clara University and St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. After being ordained a priest in 2011, he served two years at St. John Vianney Parish in East San Jose and is currently at St. Lucy parish in Campbell. He is also the director of campus ministry at St. Francis High School in Mountain View and the bishop’s delegate to build St. John XXIII high school in Morgan Hill.
Dr. Sarah Robinson-Bertoni
Dr. Sarah Robinson-Bertoni completed her B.A. in American Studies and minor in Conservation and Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. After graduation, her work in religious, arts, and environmental non-profit organizations included managing the first summer youth jobs program for California Youth Energy Services in 2001. She received the M.A. History degree from the Graduate Theological Union in 2005. At Claremont Graduate University, she earned the Ph.D. Religion degree in 2015 (dissertation title: Refreshing Religions with Edible Ethics: Local Agriculture and Sustainable Food in Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist Projects in the U.S.).
Professor Robinson-Bertoni’s research interests include religion and ecology, religion and food, comparative religious ethics, qualitative research, women’s studies in religion, and holistic ecofeminism in the study of Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim communities.
Areas of Specialty:
Religion and Ecology, Religion and Food, Comparative Religions, Women’s Studies in Religion
Dr. Helen Popper
Associate Professor, Economics
Professor Popper teaches courses in international economics, international macroeconomics, international business, and econometrics. Her current research explores the determinants of real exchange rates and capital flows, the links between foreign exchange rates and prices, and the actions of central banks in the foreign exchange markets.
She has published articles on foreign exchange market intervention, foreign exchange rates and prices, inflation, central bank activities, and foreign exchange market hedging in such journals as theJournal of International Economics, the Journal of International Money and Finance, theJournal of Money, Credit and Banking, Contributions to Macroeconomics, and the Journal of Banking and Finance. She has also published a book on international capital mobility.
Before coming to Santa Clara, Professor Popper received her Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley, then worked at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C., where she routinely briefed the Board on international economic and financial developments. Along the way, she has been a visiting scholar at the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, the Bank of Mexico and at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and a visiting associate professor at UC Berkeley. She has consulted for the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, and in the utility industry. She has worked for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and for Bank of America, providing econometric models and forecasts.
In her spare time, she enjoys windsurfing, native gardening, and relaxing with her husband and young daughter.