Patrick Bitterman is a Postdoctoral Associate on the Basin Resilience to Extreme Events (BREE) project of the Vermont EPSCoR Program. Patrick holds a PhD in geography from the University of Iowa. In his role at UVM, Patrick is studying water governance networks to better understand how we can create more effective and equitable policy processes and outcomes with respect to Lake Champlain water quality. Through this work, we hope to aid nascent, local-scale Clean Water Advisory Committees (CWACs) to meet their goals of meeting clean water mandates. Additionally, he is studying how the use and valuation of various lake-related ecosystem services affects the formation of new policies, and how environmental outcomes feed back into social processes more generally.

Dr. Bitterman's research interests include adaptation and governance, with an emphasis on developing coupled agent-based models of water and land use systems. In addition to his work with BREE, his ongoing research projects include modeling adaptation in Midwestern US agro-water systems, developing sustainability indicators for common-pool water resources in Tamil Nadu, India, and the modeling of ecosystem service delivery and valuation.