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AmElie Y. Davis, Ph.d.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Institute for Environmental Science and Policy
University of Illinois at Chicago
845 West Taylor Street
3326 SES, MC 066
Phone: 312-355-1051
Email: amelie@uic.edu
Ph.D., Land use change modeling, Geographic Information Systems, Purdue University, 2009
M.S., Oceanography, University of Delaware, 2004
B.A., Biology, Earlham College, 2001
Amélie Davis is one of two postdoctoral researches working on the National Science Foundation Urban Long-Term Research Areas Exploratory Research (ULTRA-Ex) grant titled “Connecting the Social and Ecological Sciences with Planners, Managers, and the Public: Building a Broad Foundation for the Chicago Region ULTRA”. Dr. David Wise of IESP and Biological Sciences is the Principal Investigator of this grant at UIC. Amélie is working with the Chicago Wilderness science team, a biodiversity alliance of over 250 organizations in the metropolitan Chicago area, from southern Wisconsin through northern Illinois and Indiana into southwest Michigan. The Chicago Wilderness science team includes researchers from a wide range of key Chicago-area universities and research organizations. Amélie is researching the connections between the biodiversity-recovery goals of the region-wide Green Infrastructure Vision of Chicago Wilderness and the delivery of critical ecosystem services (from the cultural to the biogeochemical) to human communities throughout the Chicago region. Also, through a series of outreach and education activities, she is assisting in development of the integrated theoretical and empirical framework for a long-term socio-ecological research program in the Chicago metropolitan region. Click here for more information about this project.
Amélie Davis received her B.A. degree in Biology from Earlham College, her M.S. degree in Oceanography from the University of Delaware at the former Center for Marine Studies and her Ph.D. from Purdue University in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. While at Purdue she was instrumental in starting a recycling program for home football games, the installation of a vegetated roof on Purdue University's hall of student services (see a video here) as well as attempting to pass a Pay-as-you-throw garbage collection system for the city of West Lafayette, IN. Amélie's professional interests include contributing to research in landscape ecology, land change science, and sustainability, as well as promoting open access journals and data, and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in a variety of disciplines. Some of Amélie's research with collaborators from Purdue focused on the amount of land we devote to sprawling parking lots and has been featured in Salon Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, AASHE, and Discovery News.
From Fall 2009 to Spring 2011 Amélie was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Furman University funded by a Mellon Foundation grant through the Associated Colleges of the South programs in sustainability and the environment. Her role was to design, develop and teach three entirely new classes for Furman University. These classes were entitled 'Landscape Ecology and Planning', 'Sustainability and Low Carbon Society', and 'Principles of Sustainability Science'. She also taught an 'Introduction to GIS' class and provided GIS assistance to students and professors, served as an advisor for student research and assisted staff at the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability with the crafting of Furman University's Climate Action Plan. In one of her classes students completed Furman's greenhouse gas inventory for fiscal year 2009 as well as researched and presented projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the student revolving loan fund committee.