Frank Davenport
Summer 2007 WAS*IS
 I received my bachelors degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Redlands in Spring 2002. From 2000-2005 I held various positions at the Redlands Institute for Environmental, Design, Management, and Policy- a GIS research/consulting group based at the University of Redlands. My work was split between spatial analysis and modeling to support desert tortoise translocation, analyzing indicators of child development in San Bernardino County, and enterprise GIS design and implementation for both a California Regional Water Board and the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative.
Following Redlands I worked in Panama on the NASA/USAID sponsored Central American Regional Monitoring and Visualization System (SERVIR; see http://servir.nsstc.nasa.gov/). I spent extensive time working with the World Food Program defining the decision requirements for disaster responders concerned with food aid and how we could tailor a product around those requirements. It was through this work that I discovered the tremendous importance of better tools, methods, and data in improving our understanding of interactions between weather and society.
I'm currently a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). I am interested in integrating weather and socioeconomic spatial datasets to improve famine and food security early warning systems. To this end I am working with the Climate Hazards Group (CHG) here at UCSB. The CHG supports the weather forecasting and modeling needs of the FEWS NET (Famine Early Warning System Network; see http://www.fews.net/) program. My interest in WAS*IS stems both from my interest in Food Security and my desire to be more familiar with the unique technical and computational challenges that arise from trying to model complex phenomena like weather patterns and coupled social-ecological interactions.
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