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Marissa Isaak came to the University of Arizona with a diverse background. She received her BA from Claremont McKenna College in Economics and International Relations in 2003, worked as an environmental consultant to companies managing their climate change policy risk, served as the Middle East manager for an NGO that promoted global legal reform, and received a prestigious Dorot Fellowship that allowed her to do a variety of environmental projects in Israel. She returned to school, earning her MA in Geography at the University of Oregon in 2010. Today she is pursuing her PhD in the School of Geography and Development (SGD) at the University of Arizona and working as a graduate research assistant (GRA) for the Water Resources Research Center (WRRC). This semester she is taking a leave of absence to care for her first child, born in January.
She came to the UA to take advantage of its robust resources in arid land management and water policy. As a student in SGD, she has taken courses on water politics and policy, arid lands, Middle East urbanism, and science and technology studies. She taught an undergraduate course on Political Geography. A self-described “water geek,” she cares deeply about finding solutions to water scarcity challenges around the globe. As a GRA at the WRRC, she assisted with a new book project that resulted from a workshop held in 2010, which brought together top water decisionmakers from Israel, Palestine, and Arizona (AzIP). The resulting book will cover challenges in the Middle East and the American southwest regarding water resources. Additionally, Marissa has conducted extensive research on Israeli water policy for Dr. Sharon Megdal, attending the Deserts, Drylands, and Desertification conference held at Sde Boker, Israel in November 2010.
Marissa’s research is closely related to the topics addressed at the AzIP workshop. Drawing on her experiences living in Israel and Jordan, and her Hebrew and Arabic language skills, she is investigating the social and political impact of Israel’s recent transition toward large-scale desalination in its water system. In the last ten years, Israel has moved swiftly to insulate itself from periodic drought by building some of the world’s largest seawater desalination plants along its Mediterranean coast. Much work has been done on the technical (both scientific and economic) aspects of these plants, but comparatively little research has occurred looking at desalination as a social and political force in society. Marissa’s work will lend valuable insight into how policymakers manage both the water and electricity requirements of these plants, how people perceive and treat this “new water”, and how financial risks of desalination are distributed. Given the considerable international popularity of desalination to solve water scarcity in arid regions, Marissa’s analysis will inform other regions with a desalination agenda.
Since beginning her PhD at UA she has received a number of awards. She received the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute (SBSRI) Grant Development Award and additional funding from SBSRI for a pilot study in Israel. She was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant from the Center for Middle East studies for continued Arabic language study in Jordan in summer of 2011. And she is currently an AICE/Schusterman Israel Scholar for her work related to Israel studies.
This summer, Marissa will return to the Middle East to begin dissertation field work. She intends to graduate in the spring of 2014.