Graduate student Felipe Murtinho filed his dissertation, Adaptation in Watershed Management among Andean Rural Communities, this summer. Committee co-chairs Hallie Eakin and David López-Carr and committee members Christina Tague and Elinor Ostrom were very impressed with Felipe’s work. 2009 Economics Nobel Prize Winner, Ostrom opined that Felipe wrote a strong dissertation. Some of the more methodologically inclined of us may take note of Ostrom’s main revision requirement for Felipe’s dissertation: ‘’He only needs to explain some of his findings in a little more depth and not stop with the equations (which are indeed important, but not fully self-explanatory).”
Felipe was a successful graduate student in our department by any measure, having won over a dozen awards and fellowships and having produced several peer reviewed publications while at UCSB. We will miss him and wish him the best in his new Visiting Assistant Professor position at the Institute of Public Service, Seattle University. But most importantly, we wish Felipe and wife Tanya hearty congratulations on the birth last week of son Lucas!
Editor’s note: Thanks to David López-Carr for providing this article. For more about Felipe, see the May 4, 2009 article, “Felipe Murtinho Wins Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.”
