Craig Allen received his Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida in 1997, a M.S. in Wildlife Science in 1993 from Texas Tech University and a B.S. in Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1989. He held a post-doc position in Zoology at the University of Florida, working with C.S. Holling on investigations of the relationships between diversity and resilience, and variability and scale breaks in biological and other systems.

Earlier in life, he was raised mostly in Madison, Wisconsin, but was born in Berkeley, California and has also lived in South Hampton and Oxford, England, and Katwijk Aan Zee, the Netherlands.

Allen was the Unit Leader for the South Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Forestry and natural Resources and the Department of Biological Sciences at Clemson University.  

Ann Salomon Bleed is a registered Professional Engineer who, after earning a Ph. D. in ecology from the University of Wisconsin, earned a Masters Degree in Engineering at the University of Nebraska . 

Bleed was an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska from 1982 until 1988 teaching in Engineering and the Natural Resources program and doing research at the Conservation and Survey Division. She continues to serve the University as an Adjunct Professor.

From 1988 to 2000, Bleed was the State Hydrologist at the Department of Water Resources. When the Department of Water Resources merged with the Natural Resources Commission, Ann became the Deputy Director. Since August 20, 2006 Bleed has served as Acting Director of the Department of Natural Resources.

• "Adaptive Management in Superfund: Thinking like a Contaminated Site" (forthcoming in N.Y.U. Envtl. L.J.)
• "Presidential Greenspeak: How Presidents Talk About the Environment and What It Means" (with Jonathan Riehl), 23 Stan. Envtl. L.J. 195 (2004).
• "How Local Environmental Laws Can Further Federal Environmental Goals," in John R. Nolan, ed., New Ground: The Advent of Local Environmental Law (Environmental Law Institute, 2003).
• “Bargaining, Politics and Law in Environmental Regulation,” in Environmental Contracts: Comparative Approaches to Regulatory Innovation in the United States and Europe (Kluwer Law International, 2001).
• "Choices and Institutions in Watershed Management," 25 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev. 379 (2000).

David D. Cookson is Special Counsel to the Nebraska Attorney General.  He practices primarily in the areas of interstate water issues and environmental law.   Prior to his work for the Nebraska Attorney General, Cookson was in private practice in Atlanta, Georgia with the law firm Webb, Carlock, Copeland, Semler & Stair.

Cookson has represented the State of Nebraska as lead counsel and as a negotiator in interstate water original actions in the U.S. Supreme Court.  He has negotiated and structured successful settlements of two interstate original actions.  He is also lead counsel for Nebraska in all current interstate water litigation, including the six cases involving the US Army Corps of Engineers operation of the Missouri River Main Stem System.  His environmental responsibilities include directing Nebraska’s defense and negotiations in Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact litigation.  He is the Attorney General’s Office representative on the Nebraska Water Policy Task Force that prepared a sweeping revision of Nebraska water law on integrated management that was adopted by the Nebraska Legislature in 2004.
 
He earned his J.D. in 1987 from the University of Nebraska, his B.S. in 1982 from Nebraska Wesleyan University.  He is admitted to the bars of Georgia, Nebraska and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mike Drain is Natural Resources Manager for Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District (CNPPID) in Holdrege. Drain is a licensed professional engineer and has been with CNPPID for 10 years. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1993 and 1995 and is a member of the National Society of Professional Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Water Resources Association and National Ground Water Association. Drain, his wife Melissa and their son and daughter reside in Holdrege.

Sherilyn C. Fritz is a Willa Cather Professor, with appointments in the Department of Geosciences and School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

She is interested in the interface of geological, biological, and atmospheric sciences and works on contemporary lakes and their geologic record.   Her research interests are in long-term environmental change, particularly using the fossil record to reconstruct natural patterns of climate variation and to evaluate human impact on lakes.   She has active research projects on the drought history of the Great Plains and northern Rocky Mountains, on long-term climate change in the tropical Andes, and on the biogeochemistry of grassland lakes in mid-continental North America. 

Fritz is co-director of the Water Resources Research Initiative at UNL.

She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Minnesota in 1985, M.S. in Biology from Kent State University in 1979 and a B.A. in Biology from Macalester College in 1970.

Jim Goeke is a research hydrogeologist with the UNL-IANR Conservation and Survey Division stationed at the UN Research and Extension Center at North Platte.  Goeke works with local agencies, and individuals to identify, monitor and manage groundwater problems.  He also assists in the development of groundwater supplies plus defining and interpreting regional geology.  His current research includes a base line water quality study with the Twin Platte Natural Resources District, a meadow hydrology study at the 12,500 acre UN Gudmundsen Sandhills Research Laboratory located 5 miles northeast of Whitman, and an assessment of the effects of groundwater pumping on the flow of the Republican and Platte Rivers.  Since 1985 he has been the site manager for the North Platte Acid Rain Station and also recently initiated a dioxin monitoring station.

Goeke received his Bachelor of Science degree in geology from the University of Wisconsin in 1966 and his Master of Science in groundwater geology from Colorado State University in 1970.  From 1970-76 has worked for the UN Conservation and Survey Division in Lincoln where he was in charge of the states test drilling program across much of Nebraska.  Since 1976 he has been involved in groundwater studies in the Sandhills and the Republican Valley.  He has also been active in local and regional tree planting activities and in 1995 received the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum “Tree Planters State Award”, and the Nebraska Forest Service “State Foresters Award”.

Goeke is a member of numerous state and national organizations.

Lance Gunderson attended the University of Florida, receiving BS and MS degrees in Botany and a PhD in Environmental Engineering Sciences.  He worked as a botanist with the US National Park Service in the Everglades and Big Cypress regions for over a decade, was a research scientist in the Dept. of Zoology at the University of Florida for a decade, and since 1999 has been Associate Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

He is currently Co-Editor in Chief of Ecology and Society, and member of the science advisory board for the Grand Canyon Research and Monitoring Center. From 1997-2000 he served as the executive director of the Resilience Network, a program of the Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. From 2002-2005 he was chair of the NAS/NRC on Ecological Effects of Road Density. He is currently Vice-Chair of the Resilience Alliance, an international network of researchers who study management of regional resource systems.

His ongoing research interests are in two major categories: 1) how scientific understanding influences resource policy and management and 2) understanding how ecosystem processes and structures interact across space and time scales.  He has been involved in the in environmental assessment and management of large-scale ecosystems, including the Everglades, Florida Bay, Upper Mississippi River Basin, and the Grand Canyon. 

His interests are in the human and institutional dimensions to resource ecology, and to that end, has co-edited books entitled, "Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions" that compares case histories of managing large, complex ecosystems; "Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature” that attempts to synthesize interdisciplinary concepts that underpin sustainable actions and “Resilience and the Behavior of Large Scale Ecosystems” that documents non-linear dynamics in ecosystems.  He has also published over 50 articles on the ecology and management of the Everglades.

Kyle Hoagland is an Omaha native. He received his B.S. from Michigan State University in zoology, then a M.S. from Eastern Michigan University in aquatic ecology. He returned to Nebraska for a Ph.D. in life sciences (limnology) from UNL in 1981. After completing his degree, he spent a year at the University of Maine doing work on acid rain, a year at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge teaching botany to 250 attentive undergraduates, and then on to his first faculty position at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he taught and conducted research for seven years.

In 1990, Hoagland again returned to Nebraska, this time as a faculty member in the Department of Forestry, Fisheries & Wildlife. His research is in the area of water quality, particularly the effects of herbicides on streams and reservoirs, and on the ecology of algae. He has published over 55 research papers and book chapters on his work, and since 1990 has received more than $5 M in grant support.

Hoagland has taught courses on lakes, streams, aquatic plants and wetlands, including courses at UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station near Ogallala. He has been director of the Water Center at UNL intermittently for the past five and a half years and now also co-leads the new Water Resources Research Initiative.

Associate Professor Bruce Hooper is the 2005 UCOWR Water Studies Fellow at the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Institute of Water Resources, Virginia. He has extensive research, consulting and teaching experience in policy and program development in water resources management, information exchange, integrated river basin management and floodplain management. Dr Hooper holds a PhD in Geography and Masters of Natural Resources degrees from the University of New England, Australia. In 1994, he was the awarded the [US] Universities Council on Water Resources  Social and Behavioral Dissertation Award for his PhD research. He has advised Australian and Indian governments on institutional strengthening and capacity building in water resources management and integrated catchment management. He played a key role in identifying institutional arrangements for local government to address the Sydney Water Crisis of 1998, developed a Toolbox of water policy instruments with the Global Water Partnership in 2001 and has received national awards for his work in floodplain management policy and performance indicators. He played a formative role in establishing the Australian Water Partnership for the Global Water Partnership, and created Australia’s Water Vision 2025 for the 2nd World Water Forum. Hooper’s research has resulted in the development of a prototype information exchange program for watershed management (winning a Land and Water Australia Innovation Award), and policy recommendations for integrated floodplain management and improved adoption of salinity management in the Murray-Darling Basin. He is currently developing river basin organization performance indicators with the US Army Corps of Engineers - to facilitate basin organizations’ self-assessment of their ability to implement integrated water resources management. In 2005 he published Integrated River Basin Governance. Learning from International Experiences (IWA Publications, London). He is also the author of two co-edited books: on water allocation for the environment and transferability of water entitlements. He has published 15 peer-reviewed articles and over eighty research and consultancy reports and professional articles. In his research career, he has personally won over $1.4m of research funding. He is a member of the International Water Resources Association and the American Water Resources Association and is the past editor of Water International, published by IWRA. Dr Hooper is a permanent American resident, water resources researcher and teacher, based in Carbondale, Illinois.

Contact: email: bhooper@siu.edu  Tel: 1 (618) 453 6024, Department of Geography and Environmental Resources, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Il. USA.

Bill Jeffery teaches environmental law and natural resource courses at the Texas Tech University School of Law and helped launch the University's initiative to facilitate research, education and outreach on water issues by faculty and students across academic disciplines. Bill brings to these roles over thirty years of experience working with environmental issues as an attorney representing governmental and private clients. Before coming to Texas Tech, he also taught environmental courses at Northern Arizona University and at California State University at San Jose.

In addition to several years as an attorney working on water quality issues at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Jeffery has counseled clients on issues ranging from dioxin contamination at Times Beach Missouri; to groundwater and Superfund site contamination issues; to compliance with air, water, and hazardous waste laws in the United States and several foreign countries.

He also helped design a market-based "cap and trade" program for sulfur dioxide emissions from major stationary air pollution sources in the western United States and has worked on water supply issues in California and the Southwest.

Jeffery received a B.A. in political science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (Magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and received a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

As a Senior Lecturer at the University, Michael Jess holds an appointment in the recently re-constituted School of Natural Resources. Until August 2003, he also served as Acting Director of the Nebraska Water Center.

Formulation and execution of Nebraska’s water laws and public policies which govern the use of water are the central themes of several undergraduate and graduate offerings by Jess.  Other fields of interest include the hydrology of Nebraska’s rivers and aquifer systems.

Prior to joining the University in 1999, Jess was Director of Nebraska’s Department of Water Resources (now the Department of Natural Resources).  In that capacity he served as an Administrative Law Judge and arbitrated hundreds of water rights disputes. He also served as Nebraska’s Commissioner for a U.S. Supreme Court decree and four interstate compacts charged with apportioning river flows among Nebraska and adjoining states.  As Chairman of the Nebraska Boundary Commission, he participated in negotiating boundary compacts with South Dakota (1989) and Missouri (1996).

Jess is a Registered Professional Engineer and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He also holds an Administrative Law Judge’s certificate from the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada.

Carolyn Johnsen teaches science writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications.   Prior to her appointment there in 1994, she spent ten years reporting on water and other environmental issues for the Nebraska Public Radio network.  

Her work received awards for investigative, environmental, feature and documentary reporting and for breaking news, including national awards from the Public Radio News Directors, Inc., and the Society of Environmental Journalists; regional awards from the Radio Television News Directors Association and the Northwest Broadcast News Association; and state awards from the Associated Press. 

She is also the author of Raising A Stink: The Struggle Over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003.

Bradley C. Karkkainen is a nationally recognized authority in the fields of environmental and natural resources law.  After visiting at the University of Minnesota in the Fall of 2003, Karkkainen joined the University of Minnesota faculty in January, 2004 at the rank of Professor.  Beginning in the Fall of 2004, he will hold the Julius E. Davis Chair in Law.
 
Karkkainen teaches courses in environmental law, international environmental law, natural resources law, water law, land use, property, administrative law, and regulatory theory.   He is the author of numerous monographs, book chapters, and articles in leading legal and social science journals. 

His research centers on innovative strategies for environmental regulation and natural resources management, with an emphasis on mechanisms that promote continuous adaptive learning, flexibility, transparency, and policy integration.   Prior to joining the University of Minnesota faculty, Karkkainen held a visiting appointment at the University of California-Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 2002-03, and was Associate Professor at Columbia Law School in New York City from 1995 to 2003.  He has also taught courses for European lawyers at Columbia Law School's Columbia-Amsterdam Program in the Netherlands, and for conservation biology graduate students at Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC). 

Karkkainen holds a B.A. in Philosophy (1974) from the University of Michigan, and a J.D. (1994) from the Yale Law School, where he taught legal research and writing as a Teaching Assistant in 1993-94 and served as an editor of both the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law.   

In 1994-95, Karkkainen clerked for the Hon. Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit.  He is a principal investigator in the Project on Public Problem-Solving (POPPS), an interdisciplinary collaborative research effort at Columbia, Harvard, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota that is investigating innovative regulatory designs and mechanisms for public service delivery across a variety of policy domains. 

In the summers of 2002 and 2004, Karkkainen held an appointment as Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Marine Policy Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a leading center for marine science and policy studies.

Bill Lambrecht has been a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since 1983. A veteran political writer, he has in recent years written primarily about the environment and natural resources. 
 
For the Post-Dispatch, he tracked toxic waste brokers from industrialized nations to Africa and developing countries, exposing their practice of dumping their deadly messes cheaply in the poorest - and least technologically able - nations in the world.

He chronicled similarly dangerous dumping on American Indian lands from Arizona to Alaska, shaming the dumpers and the government in the process. Those stories won him more than a half-dozen journalism awards. His journalism prizes include three Raymond Clapper Awards for Washington Reporting. He lives in Fairhaven, Maryland.

Steven Light received his PhD from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources in 1983.  Light worked for the USACE Water Resources Institute for three years before being hired by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) to implement adaptive management in the Everglades.  He set up first adaptive experiment, referred to as the experimental deliveries for Northeast Shark River Slough.

After 12 years working at the executive level on water policy and management at SFWMD, Light moved to St. Paul Minnesota where he served five years as senior policy advisor to Commissioner Rod Sando, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, applying Adaptive Management to the Upper Mississippi River Basin and watersheds in the Blufflands region of Minnesota.  He was subsequently hired to direct the Agriculture and Environment program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy where he co-directed a NATO project on rural sustainability and biodiversity conservation in Central Europe. 

Over the past two years Light established Adaptive Strategies Inc. and has been working in the Everglades, Missouri River Basin, and Northwest Colorado on implementing adaptive management at regional and landscape scales.

Light founded the Collaborative Adaptive Management Network in 1999; was a founding member of the Resilience Alliance in 1997, founded the InterAmerican Dialogue for Water Management in 1993.

Virginia L. McGuire was one of the respondants to the Regional Adaptive Management Challenges panel discussion. McGuire is a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Nebraska Water Science Center.

Since 1995, she has been the project chief for the High Plains Water-level Monitoring Study, which includes assembling water levels annually for wells screened in the High Plains aquifer and using the water levels to report change water in storage for the aquifer.

Her other projects include several ground-water-quality studies in Eastern Nebraska. Two recent publications include Water in storage and approaches to groundwater management, High Plains aquifer, 2000: U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1243, and Water-Level Changes in the High Plains Aquifer, Predevelopment to 2003 and 2002 to 2003: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-2004-3097.

W. Don Nelson is the Nebraska State Director for United States Senator Ben Nelson.  As such, he supervises a staff of twelve professionals and five interns in Lincoln, Omaha, Scottsbluff and Chadron.  Prior to his current public service assignment, he was a Nebraska investment banker from 1987-2000 and was Managing Director/Manager for the Nebraska office of a national securities firm for six of those years.  

Prior to that, he was a chief policy advisor for Governors Bob Kerrey (NE), Ed Herschler (WY), J. James Exon (NE) and Norbert Tiemann (NE).  He also worked for former Congressman Douglas K. Bereuter 1969-71 when Bereuter was Director of the Nebraska State Office of Planning and Programming.

While  in  the  private sector, Mr. Nelson has participated in a wide range  of  financings  from  $50,000 to $340 million.  He is experienced in both  tax  exempt  and  taxable financing for public and corporate clients. The  areas  covered  by  these  financings  include  student  loans, school districts  and  higher education facilities, multi-family and single-family affordable  housing,  jails, health care, public power, water and sewer and
sanitary and improvement districts.

Don  graduated  from  the University of Florida and received his M.S. degree  and  Juris  Doctor  degree  from  Florida  State University.  He is licensed to practice law in the states of Nebraska, Florida and Wyoming.

Prem S. Paul became Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) on July 1, 2001. He assumed additional duties and the title of Dean of Graduate Studies on July 1, 2002. During his first four years at UNL, total research funding has doubled and UNL faculty have landed several prestigious grants, including a Mathematics and Science Partnership grant and the ANDRILL project from the National Science Foundation and biodefense, hemophilia, and school readiness grants from the National Institutes of Health. During the same time, several federally-funded multidisciplinary research centers have been established at UNL, including a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and the Plant Genomics Center funded by NSF, the Nebraska Center for Virology and the Redox Biology Center funded by NIH, and the National Drought Mitigation Center funded by USDA.

Before coming to Nebraska, Paul was a faculty member at Iowa State University, where he also served as Associate Vice Provost for Research from January 1, 2000 – June 30, 2001, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Veterinary Medicine 1993 – 1999, and Assistant Director of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station from 1996-2000. Prior to that he spent seven years at the USDA National Animal Disease Center in Ames, IA.

Paul’s scientific expertise is in virology. He earned his D.V.M. from the College of Veterinary Sciences at Panjab Agricultural University in India in 1969. He obtained his Ph.D. in veterinary microbiology from the University of Minnesota in 1975 and was board-certified in veterinary microbiology in 1977.

Paul has published more than 97 papers in refereed journals and numerous books and book chapters and review articles. His most recent publication was a review of swine exogenous viruses in a special volume of Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology focused on xenotransplantation. His research has been funded by grants from USDA, NIH, commodity organizations, and pharmaceutical companies. He also received a T-35 grant from the NIH-NCRR to encourage veterinary medical students in biomedical research and several grants from the Merck Company Foundation for the Merck-Merial Veterinary Scholars program. He received the SmithKline Beecham Award for Research Excellence in 1991. While at Iowa State, Paul advised 26 graduate students and mentored four postdoctoral fellows and 12 visiting scientists in his laboratory.

Paul has served on numerous review panels for NIH, USDA, and NSF and on the FDA’s subcommittee on xenotransplantation from 1997-99. He was elected to the AVMA’s Council on Research from 1996 – 2003 and served on the AAVMC’s Research Deans and Directors Steering committee from 1995 – 1997. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Veterinary Microbiology and Animal Health Research Reviews. In 2005, he served on the National Academies Committee on “Policy Implications of the International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the United States.” He is currently on the NASULGC Council on Research Policy and Graduate Education, the EPSCOR coalition board, and is the President of the Council of the Conference of Research Workers in Animal Diseases. He was recently honored with the University of Nebraska Office Personnel Association Floyd S. Oldt Boss of the Year Award.

Paul is a member of the AVMA, AAAS, American College of Veterinary Microbiologists, American Society for Virology, Conference of Research Workers in Animal Diseases, and the American Association of Swine Veterinarians.

Dr. Jan Sendzimir is a systems ecologist working as a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Laxenburg, Austria and as a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.  He lectures as a Visiting Professor at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) and the Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland.  He holds a Masters of Science in Wetlands Ecology and a Ph.D. in Systems Ecology from the Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Florida.

His research focuses in on natural science (how systems of society and nature persist or change in response to shock or long-term stress) and social science (how groups can work together to learn and manage complex systems). To test means by which groups learn he applies verbal, graphic and mathematical modeling as methods to bridge and unite diverse perspectives from different disciplines. In pursuit of durable solutions that incorporate experience from all across society he explores a variety of methodological frameworks –“action research,” “participatory science,” “Adaptive Management” that stimulate collaboration between professionals and lay people in citizen-science dialogues that integrate research, policy and local practice. 

He has applied such frameworks to guide scientific research and policy development related to the sustainable development of communities and ecosystems in five river systems: the Narew (Poland), the Oder and Barycz rivers (Poland), the Tisza river (Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary) and the Amudarya river (Uzbekistan). He currently directs research teams in two European Union 6th framework projects, NeWater and CAVES, on research applied to management problems arising from complex combinations of ecological, economic and socio-political factors that occur over relatively large areas such as river basins, major watersheds and mountain chains.

Karina Schoengold is an assistant professor of environmental economics with a joint appointment in the School of Natural Resources and the Department of Agricultural Economics. She is also affiliated with the Water Center at UNL, with research interests in environmental and resource economics, water resource economics, water pricing, and irrigation technology choice.

She received my bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1998, and then spent two years working at an economic consulting firm. She received her master’s and doctorate degrees in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and 2005, respectively.

Jerd Smith holds a political science degree from the University of Evansville and a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She currently covers water, drought and growth issues for the Rocky Mountain News, where she has worked since 1997. 

Before joining the newspaper’s city desk in 2001, she worked as a business reporter, covering energy and telecommunications. Prior to joining the News she served as business editor at the Boulder Daily Camera and as an editor and writer at the Denver Business Journal. 

William Thomas is the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He teaches in the Department of History courses on American History, the Civil War, Southern History, Gilded Age, and Digital History.  He has served as Director and co-founder of the Virginia Center for Digital History and Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia where he led research in the field of digital humanities scholarship.  His digital research initiatives have included The Valley of the Shadow, Race and Place: African American Community in the Jim Crow South, Television News of the Civil Rights Era, and The Railroad and the Making of Modern America. He is also the author of Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South, published in 1999 by Louisiana State University Press. 

Recently, he co-authored with Edward L. Ayers a fully electronic scholarly article for publication in the American Historical Review, titled "The Differences Slavery Made:  A Close Analysis of Two American Communities."  The article is based on their research in the Valley of the Shadow project.  Ayers, Thomas, and Anne S. Rubin shared the Lincoln Prize in 2001 from the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College for the Valley of the Shadow project, and the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association in recognition of the project as an outstanding contribution to the teaching of history. 

Thomas was awarded recognition as a Mead Honored Faculty at the University of Virginia in 2004-05.  He and his students produced a documentary film, Rising Up, on the African American experience in Civil Rights era Virginia.  The film will be released as a documentary for PBS in 2006.

Thomas' current research initiative is The Aurora Project: A Dynamic Atlas of American History, an interdisciplinary team effort to study and represent the systems, processes, and networks in American history.  The project is a collaborative research initiative among the University of Nebraska Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the Department of Computer Science, and partners at the University of Virginia.  As a co-director of the Aurora Project with Edward L. Ayers, Thomas is leading research on railroads and the making of modern America between 1850 and 1890.

He earned his Masters and Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia.  He is a graduate of Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and Trinity College in Connecticut.  Thomas currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia.  He lives in Lincoln with his wife and their three children.

Ron Yoder, P.E., is Professor and Head of the Biological Systems
Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  His research
and teaching interests are in the areas of agricultural water management,
measurement and estimation of evapotranspiration, water and solute movement
in the vadose zone, and land use impacts on water quality.  He has worked
in Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, and Tennessee.

Sandra Zellmer is a professor of law at the University of Nebraska College of Law.  She has taught natural resources, water law, public lands, environmental law and related topics since 1997 at Nebraska, as well as the University of Toledo College of Law, Tulane Law School and Drake University Law School.   She is an active member of the Center for Progressive Reform, the American Bar Association, and serves on the steering committee for the University’s Water Resources Research Initiative.

Prior to teaching, Zellmer was a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division, litigating cases for the National Park Service, National Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies.  She also practiced natural resources law at Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and clerked for the Honorable William W. Justice, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas.  Zellmer received her LL.M in environmental law from the George Washington University National Law Center, where she concentrated on natural resources law, and her JD from the University of South Dakota. 

Zellmer has published numerous articles on environmental law, water law, natural resources, public lands management, biodiversity, and environmental decisionmaking.  She is also a co-author of a casebook, Natural Resources Law, to be published by West/Thomson Publishing Co. in 2006 (with Laitos, Wood, and Cole).