Additional Governing Scientists and Members

Dr. Meryl P. Gardner is a Professor of Marketing at the Lerner College of Business and Economics. Dr. Gardner’s research interests involve viewing marketing opportunities through a consumer psychology lens, with a focus on the influence of effect on consumer behavior and the role of marketing in socially positive behavior change. She is particularly interested in consumer response to energy-efficient technologies and socially beneficial products. Her work has appeared in Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Letters, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Advertising and other journals.

Dr. Ajay Prasad is the College of Engineering Alumni Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is the founder and former Director of the Center for Fuel Cell Research which was established to facilitate coordination amongst UD faculty members working in fuel cells and the hydrogen infrastructure, and to build connections with industry. Professor Prasad also directs the University of Delaware Fuel Cell Bus Program whose goal is to develop and demonstrate fuel cell powered transit vehicles and hydrogen refueling stations. Professor Prasad’s other research interests include wind and ocean current energy, and vehicle to grid technology. He is also interested in energy-efficient, solar-powered buildings.

Dr. Dana Veron is an Associate Professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment where she has an appointment in both the Department of Geography and the  Physical Ocean Science and Engineering program in the School of Marine Science and Policy. She is a founding member of CCPI. Dr. Veron’s recent research interests include offshore wind resource assessment, sea breeze circulation, land-ocean-atmospheric interactions, and regional climate change. Her research involves local-to-mesoscale atmospheric modeling along the Mid-Atlantic coastline and in the Arctic, as well as analysis of in situ observations of low-level winds and boundary layer clouds. Dr. Veron co-teaches the course on offshore wind power, as well as teaching courses on physical meteorology, and climate change.

Affiliated Scientists and Members

Dr. Suresh G. Advani is the George W. Laird Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Composite Materials. His research focus is on transport phenomena as applied to Composite Manufacturing and Fuel Cells. Over the last two decades, he has contributed to development of the science base of composite manufacturing processes. Over the last couple of years he has applied that knowledge to provide insight into improvement and enhancement of composite wind blade manufacturing using fiber placement and liquid molding processes. He is the North American Editor for the journal Composite Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing, has co-authored a text entitled Process Modeling in Composite Manufacturing, and written over 225 journal articles.

Dr. David L. Burris is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and an Assistant Professor of the DE Biotechnology Institute. His research interests are in the area of materials tribology; research activities target an improved understanding of the fundamental processes underlying friction and wear at contacting interfaces. Current research efforts are motivated by challenges of space lubrication, joint disease rehabilitation and prevention, and wind turbine drivetrain reliability.

Dr. Helen Bowers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Finance in the Lerner College of Business and Economics.  Dr. Bowers has published numerous articles on corporate finance and valuation.  As a Senior Advisor for the Woodward Group, LLC, a merchant bank and consulting firm, she has performed valuation analysis for fairness opinions, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, restructurings and litigation support.  Dr. Bowers’ current interests include the development of financial markets and specialized financial instruments, capital formation, valuation and the structure of project finance in the renewable energy sector.    Dr. Bowers is also a member of the Visiting Faculty at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France where she teaches Innovation in Energy Finance.

Dr. Jeffrey Buler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. His research is focused on the movement, behavior, and ecology of birds during migratory stopover and modeling wildlife species distributions across spatial scales. Dr. Buler is also one of a handful of aeroecologists in the United States actively using the national network of weather surveillance radars to study the distribution, movement, and habitat use patterns of migratory birds and other flying animals in the airspace. His radar research includes developing techniques to quantify bird distributions, assessing bird response to habitat management and restoration activities, identifying important stopover areas, and examining how migrating birds respond to extreme weather events and negotiate ecological barriers to migration. He is also studying the flight activity of birds and bats at the University of Delaware’s wind turbine in Lewes, DE.

Dr. John A. Callahan is a Climatologist and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences.  Dr. Callahan’s research is interdisciplinary and includes significant service as well as research.  He currently serves as a Chapter Author (Coastal Effects) on the Fifth National Climate Assessment and has provided guidance in real-time during severe weather events and for long-term planning in regard to sea-level rise, climate change, and environmental monitoring.  Recent focus of his research has been on coastal flooding, storm surge, and tidal data analysis in the Mid-Atlantic region, however, other research projects include remote sensing of atmospheric water vapor, marine spatial planning for offshore wind, saltmarsh vegetation biases in lidar-derived elevation datasets, dendrochronology in a coastal ghost forest, and impact of weather on the transportation system, among others.  He serves on the Delaware State Hazard Mitigation Council and was committee chair and lead author of the report that determined the future SLR scenarios that the State Delaware currently uses in their Climate Action Plan and other planning activities.

Dr. James J. Corbett is a Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy with a joint appointment in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is a leading collaborator in a multi-university Sustainable Intermodal Freight Transportation Research (SIFTR) program, an international research collaboration to improve the effective use of highway, waterway, railroad, and air transportation infrastructure.  Dr. Corbett also conducts technology-policy research related to transportation, including groundbreaking research on air emissions from maritime transport, energy and environmental impacts of freight transportation, and assessment of technological and policy strategies for improving goods movement. Among more than 175 publications related to shipping and multimodal transportation, Dr. Corbett coauthored the 2000 IMO Study on Greenhouse Gases from Ships, and the Second IMO Greenhouse Gas Study 2009i.

Dr. Stephen Dexter is a Professor of Applied Science and Marine Biology in the School of Marine Science and Policy. Prior to accepting his position at UD, Dr. Dexter conducted a post-doc in Marine Corrosion and Fouling at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Department of Ocean Engineering. Dr. Dexter conducts research in a variety of areas, including durability of materials for, and marine corrosion and biocorrosion of, wind power systems. He also undertakes research on the influence of microbial films on corrosion and corrosion electrochemistry; cathodic protection and calcareous deposition; marine corrosion and biofouling control; bioattachment and bioadhesion. He’s served on the editorial boards of Corrosion (1988-present) and Biofueling journals (1992-2002) and was an Assistant Editor for Biocorrosion, Biofouling Journal (2003 – 2006). Dr. Dexter has been a technical consultant on numerous industrial, government and private projects, including the US Navy, DARPA and NASA.

Dr. Fabrice Veron is a Professor and Director of Physical Ocean Science and Engineering in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Dr. Veron’s research focuses on air-sea interaction and the small scale fluid dynamics at the surface of the ocean. He is particularly interested in the generation of turbulence on both sides of natural free surfaces, such as that generated by breaking surface waves and air-flow separation. He is also conducting research on the transport and evaporation of marine aerosols as well as the turbulence generated by rainfall. Dr. Veron has extensive experience in wave measurements and modeling, coupled air-sea surface wave related problems including wave turbulence modulations, and the influence of wave on air sea fluxes and wave modeling.

Dr. Matthew Oliver is an Associate Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy. Dr. Oliver oversees the Ocean Exploration, Remote Sensing and Biogeography Laboratory (ORB Lab) at the University of Delaware. He is also one of the inaugural members of the Robotic Discovery Laboratories, which opened in August 2014. In 2015 he was named the Patricia & Charles Robertson Professor of Marine Science & Policy. Dr. Oliver graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in Oceanography. His primary research interests are ocean observing, ocean biogeography, polar ecosystems, coastal ecosystems, remote sensing, phytoplankton, bioluminescence, and evolution. He focuses on biological oceanography and biogeography, working to pinpoint where ocean organisms live, their populations and factors that influence their distributions.

Dr. George R. Parsons is a Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Economics. He has served as director of the Marine Policy Program. Most of Dr. Parsons’ research centers on understanding consumers’ preferences for environmental goods. He is a specialist in choice modeling techniques including travel cost models, hedonic price models, contingent valuation, and choice experiments. He has experience in survey research, discrete-choice econometrics, applied welfare economics, and consumer demand. His most closely related work is choice models valuing the attributes of electric vehicles, the visual disamenity of offshore wind power, beach closures (including beach narrowing due to sea level rise), and shorebird recreation. His work appears in the JEEM, Resource and Energy Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, Land Economics, and other field journals in environmental economics.

Dr. Arthur Trembanis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. Dr. Trembanis graduated from the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Studies with a Ph.D. in Marine Science. He currently directs the Coastal Sediments Hydrodynamics & Engineering Lab (CSHEL), which seeks to understand the morphodynamic processes of coastal systems. In his post-doctoral studies, he worked with the United States Geological Survey at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where he focused on the morphodynamics of complex seabed features such as Rippled Scour Depressions (RSDs) based on observational records and numerical modeling strategies. Dr. Trembanis’ primary research interests are in the observation and modeling of coastal morphodynamics, the morphological interplay of hydrodynamics (waves and currents) with sediment and seabed features (morphology).

Dr. Jens Schubert is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics in the Lerner College of Business and Economics. Dr. Schubert graduated from The University of Tennessee Knoxville with a Ph.D. in Economics. Prior to graduate studies in Economics, he earned a Master of Science in Econophysics (Dipl. Phys.-Oec.) from the University of Ulm in Germany, and gained experience in the private sector, working for Accenture, Robert Bosch, and UniCredit. Dr. Schubert’s primary research interests are in the fields of environmental economics, energy economics, and industrial organization. He is also interested in questions in behavioral and financial economics. In his research, he is tying these interests to experimental economics and applied econometrics.

Dr. W. Gregory (Greg) Shriver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology where he is engaged in collaborative projects related to restoration, avian ecology, monitoring, and conservation.  He is presently working with collaborators to: 1) develop a salt marsh integrity monitoring protocol for USFWS, 2) address the long-term (30 + years) effects of forest fragmentation on a neo-tropical migratory bird reproductive success and mating systems, 3) investigate the effects of tidal marsh management practices on breeding birds, 4) determine the effects of sea level rise and tidal marsh birds on the east coast, and 5) and determine the prevalence of Campylobacter in wild birds of eastern North America.  He is currently assessing the post-construction impacts on avian and bat species at the UD Lewes Wind Turbine.  This project is focused on estimating the seasonal mortality risk.