Joshua Brown is a second year Water Resources Management student working with Joy Zedler from the Botany Department. He is most interested in restoration ecology. Before joining the Nelson Institute, Josh worked throughout the United States implementing restoration plans and controlling invasive species in national parks.
As part of his WRM curriculum, Josh participated in the 2007 WRM practicum at the UW-Arboretum. The practicum created an adaptive restoration plan for the Eastern Arboretum Marshes. He helped conduct vegetation surveys and designed experiments to determine the best restoration methods for the marshes. Josh currently works at the UW-Arboretum where he assists staff in carrying out a variety of resource management projects. In the summer and fall of 2007, he implemented an experiment that evaluated the growth characteristics of 40 native wetland plant species to determine which were ideal for storm water channel revegetation at the Arboretum. The data will be used by managers to choose plants that best control erosion and resist invasion by exotic species.
Upon graduation in the summer of 2008, Josh would like to work for a private restoration company or government agencies designing and carrying out restoration plans.
Elizabeth Finlay is a second year graduate student in the Water Resources Management Program. Prior to joining the program, she worked with water regulation and GIS in the Pacific Northwest. In Madison, Betsy is using her GIS background for spatial analysis of archeological sites and historic structures for the Wisconsin Historical Society.
As a student she has been working with Ken Genskow in the Urban and Regional Planning Department. Betsy has concentrated her course work towards the effects of land use change on the hydrology of small watersheds. She will graduate in May and hopes to be involved in implementing best management practices to limit the impact of land use change.
Betsy participated in the WRM Practicum this past summer, which focused on wetland restoration in the UW-Arboretum. Using her interests to look at broader scales, Betsy focused her efforts on change in the upstream watershed. This involved collaboratively designing a plan to limit low water quality runoff, from residential and commercial neighborhoods, from entering the wetlands. She also applied her GIS skills as the group's cartographer.
Mary-Kate Tillery Danzer is pursuing double degrees in Life Sciences Communication (with adviser Al Gunther) and Water Resources Management (with adviser Samer Alatout) with the hope that she’ll soon be a holistically-trained water communication specialist. From 2005-2006, Kate conducted field research in Indonesia as a Fulbright Scholar for her LSC thesis on latrine implementation/sanitation campaigns. Last summer (2007), Kate joined the dynamic WRM wetlands restoration project in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward where she helped lead a community survey to evaluate residents' knowledge of wetland services and to determine residential use patterns of the wetland. Kate also helped plan community outreach activities and coordinate media attention for the project. Kate brings a diverse background in teaching and journalism to the Water Resources Management program. She’s worked as a bilingual educator, a naturalist teacher as well as a producer and reporter for The Washington Bureau in the nation’s capitol. She and her husband also do free-lance video work for HDNet.
Currently, Kate is a news writer for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Following graduation, she intends to work on water and sanitation projects in underserved areas.