Stephanie Pincetl, PhD
Founding Director and Professor
California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA; Chair, PhD in Environment and Sustainability;
UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
619 Charles E. Young Drive East
La Kretz Hall – Suite 300
Los Angeles, CA 90095
310-825-2434
spincetl@ioes.ucla.edu
Pronouns: she/her
Visit the California Center for Sustainable Communities
See Dr. Pincetl's personal website
IoES Faculty Advisor to Graduate Student(s):
Stephanie Pincetl is a Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Founding Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA.
Dr. Pincetl conducts research on environmental policies and governance and analyzes how institutional rules construct how natural resources and energy are used to support human activities and create Earth Systems impacts. Her focus is on social and environmental justice and the need to develop equitable strategies to reduce human impacts on the planet. She is expert in bringing together interdisciplinary teams of researchers across the biophysical and engineering sciences with the social sciences to address problems of complex urban systems and environmental management.
Dr. Pincetl has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, urban metabolism water and energy policy. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct collaborative research with biophysical scientists on urban ecology and water management in Los Angeles, as well as from the California Energy Commission to develop a methodology to understand energy use in communities in California coupled with social policy considerations (see www.energyatlas.ucla.edu). Her book, Transforming California, the Political History of Land Use in the State, is the definitive work on land use politics and policies of California. She was a co-lead on the urban chapter of the National 2nd State of the North American Carbon Cycle Report, improving the understanding of how complex urban systems are dependent on carbon based fuels and their contribution to climate change.
Dr. Pincetl has a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA. She spent 10 years working in the nonprofit environmental justice sector and has taught in the Masters of Public Affairs at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris. Pincetl is the Faculty Director of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC), a Los Angeles regional organization dedicated to working across jurisdictions to achieve a better future. She was instrumental in making the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA its institutional home.
In recognition of her intellectual leadership in the field of urban sustainability, coupled with real-world problem solving as exemplified by the Energy Atlas, Pincetl received the prestigious Burrill Award from the American Association of Geographers at the annual 2019 meeting in Washington DC.
Pincetl has been awarded the 2020 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Geography Department at the University of Manchester. She has also been asked to join the Editorial Board of the journal Applied Energy, one of the most highly cited energy journals in the world.
Videos
The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2) was released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) on Friday, November 23, 2018. Dr. Stephanie Pincetl was one of 200 contributing experts to this interagency Highly Influential Scientific Assessment led by the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) and U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program under USGCRP auspices.
See her work in Chapter 4, “Understanding Urban Carbon Fluxes”
Groundwater and a Sustainable LA: A Roadmap to Living Without Surface Water Imports, June 8, 2018
