Meet the NEPAccess Team
Our interdisciplinary team based at the University of Arizona has the vision and expertise needed in software development, law, and environmental science to bring NEPA into the 21st century.
NEPAccess Leadership
Laura López-Hoffman
Professor, School of Natural Resources and the Environment;
Research Professor, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy
Laura is an environmental scientist working at the intersection of natural science and environmental policy.
She is a champion of using data-driven approaches to evaluate the outcomes and performance of environmental laws and policies. Laura oversees all aspects of the NEPAccess endeavor.
Steven Bethard
Associate Professor, School of Information
Using advanced tools developed through the US Department of Defense’s DARPA grant programs, Steven is bringing the power of natural language processing to bear on transforming the text in NEPA documents into data.
He leads the team’s efforts to use machine learning to identify geographic locations within text for map-based search and cumulative impacts analyses.
Kirk Emerson
Professor of Practice, School of Government and Public Policy
Kirk is the former head of the US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, one of only three federal agencies authorized to implement NEPA.
She has deep expertise in conflict management and collaborative governance. On the NEPAccess project, she helps hone the goals of public participation and transparency in governance.
Aaron Lien
Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources and the Environment
Aaron guides the development of NEPAccess’ tools to ensure they are useful for civil society groups and researchers who have an interest in understanding and improving the effectiveness of the NEPA process.
Marc Miller
Dean and Ralph W. Bilby Professor, James E. Rogers College of Law
Marc is a professor and expert in environmental law and administrative procedure. His scholarly work frequently highlights topics at the intersection of environmental science, policy, and law with special attention to the relationship between science and environmental policy-making.
Sudha Ram
Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Management Information Systems, Entrepreneurship, & Innovation
Using machine learning techniques to extract insights from large datasets gathered
from social media and healthcare, Sudha
leads the development of NEPAccess’ system architecture, including the database of NEPA documents and the algorithms that power the search tools at the heart of NEPAccess.
She is an expert in enterprise data management and prediction modeling.
The NEPAccess Student Team
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STUDENTS are vitally important to the NEPAccess project. In addition to their work of finding and cataloging EIS documents as we build our database, they are helping to develop the machine learning tools used to analyze NEPA documents. Students are manually categorizing and labeling documents in order to train the machine learning algorithms.
In this 3.5 minute video, six students explain why they are working on NEPAccess.
So far, 24 graduate and undergraduate students in a variety of academic disciplines have been indispensable members of the NEPAccess team.
The NEPAccess Team
Principal Investigator
Laura López-Hoffman, Professor, School of Natural Resources and the Environment,
and Research Professor, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy
Senior Leadership
Steven Bethard, Associate Professor, School of Information
Kirk Emerson, Professor of Practice, School of Government and Public Policy
Aaron Lien, Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources and the Environment
Marc Miller, Dean and Ralph W. Bilby Professor, James E. Rogers College of Law
Sudha Ram, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of MIS, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and
Professor, Eller College of Management
Senior Personnel
Jonathan Derbridge, Communications and Development Director, NEPAccess
Faiz Currim, Professor of Practice in Management Information Systems, Eller College of Management
Egoitz Laparra, Natural Language Processing Lead, NEPAccess
Emily McGovern, Research Director, NEPAccess
Paul Mirocha, User Experience Design Lead, NEPAccess
George Shaffer, Full-stack Developer, NEPAccess
Other Personnel
Steve Anderson, Filmmaker and Independent Film producer; Director, Teen Street Films.
Ashley Stava, Supervisor of Undergraduate Student Researchers; MS, Natural Resources
Buomsoo Kim, PhD, MIS, Eller College of Management
PhD Student Researchers
Graduate Student Researchers
Blaze Smith, Masters Student, Natural Resources
Carly Winnebald, Masters Student, Natural Resources
Undergraduate Student Researchers
Kaya Curry, Undergraduate, Natural Resources
Jacqueline Kruzich, Undergraduate, Natural Resources
Alexia Smith, Undergraduate, Natural Resources
