Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows
Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
- Title
- Professor
- Division Baskin School of Engineering
- Department
- Statistics
- Phone 831-459-1484
- Fax 8314591484
- Website
- Office Location
- Engineering Building 2, 525
- Mail Stop SOE2
- Mailing Address
- 1156 High Street. MS: SOE2
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Statistics, Data Studies, Climate Change, Mathematical Modeling
Research Interests
- Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling
- Environmental and geostatistical applications
- Modeling of extreme values
- Statistical assessment of climate variability
Biography, Education and Training
- Bruno Sansó is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics of the University of California Santa Cruz, where he has been part of the faculty since the Fall of 2001. Sansó was chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics from 2009 to 2014. Before coming to Santa Cruz, he was a founding member of the Center for Statistics and Mathematical Software as well as of the Department of Scientific Computing and Statistics of Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela, and worked at USB from 1987 to 2002.
- Sansó obtained a PhD in mathematics at Universidad Central de Venezuelain 1992 with the dissertation "Near Ignorance Classes for Bayesian Analysis" written under the supervision of Luis Raúl Pericchi. After obtaining the PhD, his research activity focused on problems on robust Bayesian inference. Subsequently, Sansó worked in problems related to model selection, meta-analysis and spatio-temporal modelling for rainfall and other environmental variables, always from a Bayesian viewpoint. Currently Sansó's work is focused on Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling, environmental and geostatistical applications, uncertainty quantification for complex computer models, statistical models for extreme values and statistical assessment of climate variability.
- Sansó was the Editor in Chief for Bayesian Analysis from 2016 to 2018. He has been Associate Editor for Technometrics and for the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference. Sansó is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. Sansó was the recipient of the Mitchell Prize,awarded to outstanding papers that describe how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem, in 2009 and 2019. Sansó had leadership roles in various committees and boards of the ASA, ISBA, TIES and the Bernoulli Society. Sansó has collaborated, and continues to do so, with researchers from a number of institutions, nationally and internationally. Sansó has supervised the graduate work of more than 30 students, one of them was the recipient of the 2010 Savage Award to the best thesis in applied Bayesian Methodology. He is currently supervising several students in the graduate program on Statistical Science at UCSC.
