I have the pleasure of teaching in the Environmental Studies Program at CU-Boulder where I regularly interact with an inspiring and passionate group of students who are preparing to become the next generation of environmental leaders. I teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. My current portfolio of courses is described below. 

Undergraduate Courses

Environment and Development in South Asia (ENVS 4800)
Asia is a region with immense biological and cultural diversity; yet it is also a region that, housing one-half of the world’s poor, exemplifies the tensions between environmental sustainability, economic development, and human well-being. Are these tensions inevitable? Is it possible to lift people out of poverty without exhausting natural resources or sacrificing the integrity of the natural environment? We will explore these questions using the highly diverse and rapidly developing region of South Asia as a case study. In this course, we will examine how nations and communities have responded to social and environmental challenges in the past, such as natural hazards, poverty, overcrowding, and habitat destruction. Drawing from past successes and failures, we will also discuss opportunities for addressing emerging environmental and social problems in the future. 

Energy and Human Behavior (ENVS 3030)
This course will cover theory, research, and methods related to psychosocial  and behavioral dimensions of energy use. We will address questions such as: What motives people to conserve energy? Why don’t people invest more in energy efficiency, even when it saves them money? How do risk perceptions associated with energy and the environment influence our political and consumer behavior?  What will it take to improve consumer adoption of renewable energy sources? Students will also receive an introduction to research methods used in the environmental social sciences. We will discuss how to design and implement social scientific surveys and behavioral experiments, as well as how to do basic analysis of social scientific data. Students will apply these methods to the study of energy-related behavior, and will have an opportunity to design and scientifically evaluate a behavioral intervention of their own design.


 

Graduate Courses

Survey Research and Design (ENVS 5120)
This course is a graduate-level introduction to survey design, implementation and analysis. We will cover topics such as writing survey questions, modes of data collection, cognitive interviewing, sampling, reliability and validity , handling missing data, data management, scale construction, and common  analysis techniques used with survey data.