DELEGATION

University of Maine COP24 Delegation

Dr. Dan Dixon
Director of Sustainability

Daniel Dixon has two roles at the University of Maine. He is the campus Sustainability Director and a Research Assistant Professor with the University’s Climate Change Institute. Dan came to the U.S. with a background in engineering and science and earned his MS and PhD at UMaine. In his role as Sustainability Director, Dan provides strategic direction and leadership to promote a culture of sustainability at the University of Maine. He is responsible for the overall management and oversight of the Office of Sustainability. He works closely with all levels of university leadership to advance the University of Maine’s ongoing commitment to sustainability and engages campus leaders to foster sustainability broadly across the institution.


Jamie Haverkamp

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology

Jamie is interested in the politics of global environmental change and climate adaptation. Her work engages with theoretical discussions in political ecology, political ontology, climate and development, and postcolonial studies. Using primarily ethnographic and participatory methods, she has conducted research on the political and social dimensions of climate change in the Eastern United States, and in the Peruvian Andes. She has also worked on and published from a long-term interdisciplinary project regarding climate induced migration and displacement during her tenure at Oak Ridge National Lab. Her ongoing work in the Peruvian Andes specifically investigates climate resilient development and discourse, striving to better understand the political and relational dimensions of collaborative survival to rapid glacier retreat within highly contested landscapes.

Dr. Cindy Isenhour
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change

As an ecological and economic anthropologist, Cindy is particularly interested in the cultural construction and contemporary reproduction of linear production-consumption-disposal systems and their associated effects on the environment and climate. Several current research projects examine the market logics and global relations of trade/negotiation that enable uneven accumulation and degradation. Other research projects are focused on policies, practices and social movements intended to shift contemporary economies and consumer culture toward more sustainable forms. Cindy conducted research at COP23 in Bonn, Germany.

Will Kochtitzky
Graduate Student, School of Earth and Climate Sciences and the Climate Change Institute

Will is a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Maine where he is pursuing a master's degree with the School of Earth and Climate Science. He grew up in Nashville, TN before attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania where he earned a B.S. in Earth Sciences. He is interested in glaciers around the world and work with remotely sensed and in situ data to answer questions about glacier dynamics and mass balance. His thesis work is focused on surging glacier dynamics in the St. Elias Mountains of Western Canada and Alaska. Will has attended and conducted research at COP20 in Lima, Peru and COP23 in Bonn, Germany.

Anna McGinn
Graduate Student, School of Policy and International Affairs and the Climate Change Institute

Anna is a master's student pursuing a dual degree in Climate and Quaternary Studies with the Climate Change Institute and in Global Policy with the School of Policy and International Affairs. Her research interests include climate change adaptation governance, climate risk management, and climate and development. Her thesis research focuses on climate change adaptation at difference governance level with a particular focus on the UNFCCC processes and case studies in Nicaragua and Samoa. Her work is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She has attended and conducted research at COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011; COP21 in Paris in 2015; COP22 in Marrakech, Morocco in 2016; and COP23 in Bonn, Germany in 2017.

Alex Rezk
PhD Student, Department of Anthropology

Alex is a second-year PhD Student in the Anthropology & Environmental Policy program. An environmental social scientist, he is trained both as an anthropologist and sociologist. He previously obtained a Master's Degree in International Development and Social Change at Clark University, where he focused on the implications of climate change and its related consequences on sustainable global development, and a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Worcester State University with a focus on Environmental Sociology. Alex's research area is focused upon the human dimensions of climate change as they pertain to disaster and risk management as an issue of environmental justice. Specifically, he is interested in how local, regional, and federal bodies quantify, plan for, and cope with loss and damage sustained by coastal hazards linked to climate impacts. His past research examined how Hurricane Sandy was parsed by local government as a climate-related issue, and how the official disaster response and subsequent policy initiatives either reflected or denied an ongoing commitment by regional leadership to tackle coastal resilience head on. For his dissertation, he plans on expanding the purview of this analysis, linking sites of recent coastal disaster impact in a geographically diversified attempt to unpack how neoliberal modalities of resilience-building affect future preparedness toward chronic disaster exposure. This will be his first time attending a COP.

Captain Jim Settele, USN (Ret.)
Director, School of Policy and International Affairs

Jim Settele is the Executive Director of the School of Policy & International Affairs (SPIA), and previously served as the Interim Director of Athletics and as Chief of Staff to the President.

Jim retired from the U.S. Navy in 2009 at the rank of Captain after serving more than 27 years on active duty. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1982 and became a naval flight officer. He served in four E-2 squadrons on the USS Midway, USS Carl Vinson, USS Enterprise and USS Harry S. Truman, and was Commanding Officer of the VAW-126 Seahawks. His career also included assignment to the U.S. Naval Central Command in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, D.C. From 2001-03, Jim was a Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and in 2004 became Director of Operations, and Policy and Strategy for the combined staff of Naval Forces Europe and Sixth Fleet, based in Naples, Italy. In 2006, he came to Maine as the Commanding Officer of the Naval ROTC unit at UMaine, Maine Maritime Academy, and Husson University. In addition to his extensive military education, he has a master’s degree in information management systems from George Washington University and was a Senior Fellow at St Antony’s College in Oxford University.

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