La Kretz Graduate Student Fellows are funded by the La Kretz Center and by UCSB’s Graduate Division. We fund 2-4 fellows at any given time to support ongoing studies at the reserve.
2024-2026 Fellows
2023-2024 Fellows
Natasha Atkins is a Master of Environmental Science and Management student at UCSB’s Bren School. She grew up in the East Bay Area of California, where hiking in the foothills of Mount Diablo sparked her early interest in natural landscapes and land stewardship. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Davis, where she developed a strong foundation in ecology through coursework at the UCD Arboretum and hands-on field data collection along Putah Creek. At the La Kretz Center at Sedgwick Reserve, Natasha works on collecting and analyzing pre- and post-prescribed burn data in oak woodland and sage scrub ecosystems as part of Frank Davis’ research team. Her interests include fire ecology, vegetation monitoring, and the use of prescribed fire to support ecosystem resilience and conservation.
As a La Kretz Fellow, Lenaya spends her time at Sedgwick monitoring oaks and shrubs to understand how they respond to prescribed burns. She is an artist and Master’s student at the UCSB Bren School, interested in restoration that honors ecological integrity and repairs relations between people and land. Her background in geospatial analysis and plant ecology from her B.S. in Environmental Management and Protection at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo draws her to questions about how to measure health, resilience, and environmental justice in landscapes shaped by humans and fire.
Thuy-Tien is a passionate naturalist and Master of Environmental Science and Management candidate at UCSB’s Bren School. A life-long Californian, she received her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley where she researched an array of organisms and habitats through fieldwork and data science approaches. Thuy-Tien’s work at Sedgwick Reserve involves combining field measurements and data analysis to assist the monitoring of post-fire vegetation communities. With a specialization in conservation planning, she hopes to facilitate holistic management and conservation of California’s diverse ecosystems.
Priscilla grew up exploring nature preserves around the San Francisco Bay Area, which sparked a curiosity for how to manage natural spaces in the face of climate change and human impact. During her time with the UCI Center for Environmental Biology, Priscilla collaborated with non-profit and government agencies to research the impacts of land management techniques, climate change, plant invasion, and or wildfire on native plant communities in California. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Environmental Science and Management at the UCSB Bren School to expand her expertise in natural resource management and understand how to build resilient landscapes. At Sedgwick, Priscilla will be characterizing shrubland and woodland communities before and after prescribed burning to evaluate the use of prescribed fire to reduce wildfire threat and promote climate resilience and biodiversity.
Charlie Curtin is a master’s student pursuing a degree in environmental data science at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. He received his bachelor’s degree in GeoDesign and environmental studies from the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California in 2022. During his senior year, he worked with the USC Urban Trees Initiative, providing data-driven solutions to the City of Los Angeles to mitigate inequitable urban canopy cover in East Los Angeles. With a newly-stoked interest in forestry, he went on to work in Trinity County, California on community wildfire protection, ecological forestry, and public land management. Charlie will be working with Frank Davis and Kaili Brande on researching the effects of prescribed fire on plant communities of Sedgwick Reserve.
2022-2023 Fellows
Hannah is an Australian fire ecologist who works at the intersection of academic research and community outreach and education. One of the main findings from Hannah’s PhD research highlighted the significant impacts of fire severity on the regeneration of coastal shrub lands in southwest Australia following a large scale, extreme severity wildfire. Now, with the Hotspots Fire Project, a Australian collaborative workshop series run by the Nature Conservation Council and the Rural Fire Service, Hannah educates and empowers rural landholders to better understand fire ecology, fire safety and preparedness, to give them the resources and planning tools they need to implement small scale ecological and fuels reduction burns on their own properties. At Sedgwick, Hannah is comparing plant and fungal community structure, fuel loads and biodiversity before and after prescribed burns in sage scrub and chaparral vegetation types, to gain a better understanding of how to most effectively and sensitively manage these flammable but extremely ecologically important vegetation types.
Evie is a Master of Environmental Science and Management candidate at UCSB’s Bren School. Originally from Minneapolis, Evie grew up adventuring about the Northwoods, which inspired his love for the environment. After graduating from Whitman College with a degree in Economics-Environmental Studies, he held various environmental and forestry jobs before leaving his work to pursue a master’s degree. He currently serves as a board chair and the treasurer for 350PDX, a Portland-based environmental justice nonprofit. At Bren, Evie is specializing in conservation planning and participating in the program’s sustainable forestry fellowship. His work as a La Kretz fellow involves field measurements for the NASA SHIFT campaign and data collection for prescribed fire research at Sedgwick Reserve. He also is a Sustainable Forest Fellow and National Forest Foundation Conservation Connect fellow, with his focuses being forest restoration and wildfire mitigation. In his spare time, Evie enjoys Los Padres National Forest and spends his hours backpacking, skiing, biking, and surfing.
2019-2023 Fellows
Kaili is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the Bren School at UCSB. Prior to UCSB, she worked for the National Park Service, an environmental consulting firm, and an education-based nonprofit, focusing on a range of northern California ecosystems and their conservation issues. In the PhD, her research is focused on fire ecology of California oak woodlands and savannas, and all her data collection is conducted at Sedgwick Reserve
2018-2019 Fellows
Born and raised in Santa Barbara, Brad grew to love the oak woodlands and flower-covered hillsides of the area on backpacking trips into the Los Padres National Forest. After graduating from UC Berkeley he spent seven years working for the US Forest Service and National Park Service throughout the wild landscapes of Arizona, California, Colorado, and Montana. He is currently finishing his master’s degree at UCSB’s Bren School, focusing on how to incorporate climate resiliency strategies into the management of protected areas and nature preserves and the conservation of wild species.
Megan is a master’s student at the UCSB Bren School specializing in Conservation Planning. She worked previously as an environmental due diligence manager in the Bay Area, where she researched properties to identify any environmental contamination. As part of her master’s group thesis, she tracked vegetation cover changes over 80 years to help guide management at the new Dangermond Preserve.
Maggie is a masters student and former Lab Manger for UCSB faculty member Hillary Young. She is interested in how human-induced disturbances can cascade through trophic levels to impact ecosystem services. Maggie plans to work at the Tejon Ranch Exclosure Experiment and investigate how native and non-native grazing can change above- and below-ground interactions to alter food webs and nutrient cycling.
2017-2018 Fellows
Gabriel is a PhD student from Minas Gerais, Brazil. He holds a Bachelor and a Master Degrees in Geography from University of Brasilia (UnB). He decided to pursue a PhD degree in Geography at UCSB after working for 7 years at The Nature Conservancy as a GIS specialist focusing his efforts on the Cerrado biome. His interest is working with Remote Sensing applied to environmental issues, especially fire studies on the Amazon Forest and its transition to the Cerrado biome. Gabriel likes mountain-biking, backpacking, camping.
Fernanda is a researcher in GIS Conservation Planning and Remote Sensing conducting her Ph.D. studies in Geography at UCSB. She has 7+ years of experience working in international and collaborative projects focused on geospatial tools applied to conservation and land management. What motivates her is the interdisciplinary interaction between geospatial tools (remote sensing and GIS) and landscape ecology applied to biodiversity conservation.