The Alaska World Affairs Council Presents

Dr. Lilian Alessa

"On the Water's Edge:
Freshwater and the Future of the Arctic"

Friday, 30th January 2009 – Hilton Hotel
Doors open at 11:30 p.m. - Program begins at 12:00 p.m.
For Reservations
RSVP by Wednesday, 28th January to the Alaska World Affairs Council
by telephone 276-8038 or by email to AlaskaWorldAffairs.org .
Lunch Program $20 for Members - $25 for Non-Members - $6 for Coffee Only
 

Dr. Lilian Alessa received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1998. Her expertise in cell architecture as well as her non-western cultural background has strongly shaped her current area of research: dynamics of social ecological systems. Specifically, she utilizes a complexity framework to uncover and resolve the characteristics of the human hydrological system, or the “H2S”. In 2004 she established the Resilience and Adaptive Management (RAM) Group and, in 2008, became the Director. Her work has taken her around the world to examine the H2S as a social process and, in 2007, her group contributed the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI), the first and only integrated tool to assess community resilience to changes in water resources at high latitudes. She serves on several regional and national committees that deal with cyberinfrastructure, water resources and social dynamics and is a Principal Investigator on several large National Science Foundation grants, including the Alaska EPSCoR and the Open Agent Based Modeling Community for the Social Sciences. Currently, she is testing a model hypothesizing that accurate decision making regarding water resources can be predicted through a “distancing effect” which is mediated by the levels of technology present in the system. Dr. Alessa’s work draws heavily on the integration of unifying principles from diverse systems, ranging from cells to climate and she uses both qualitative and quantitative techniques to develop tools which can be used in policy and decision making for the H2S. Her publications include “Freshwater vulnerabilities and resilience on the Seward Peninsula as a consequence of landscape change” in Global Environmental Change (2008, 18, 256-270), “Social-ecological Hotspots Mapping: a spatial approach for identifying coupled social-ecological space” in Landscape and Urban Planning (2008, 85, 27-39) and “Anthropogenic biomes: a key contribution to earth-system science” in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (2008).