Nathan Sayre is the Associate Dean for Faculty for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. He is also a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was first appointed in 2004. His research centers on the political economy and environmental history of semi-arid rangelands, especially in the southwestern United States: how they have changed, how they have been (mis)understood and (mis)managed, and the politics and economics of land-use change, fire restoration, and endangered species conservation. He has written four books and dozens of articles on these topics. He has also published on scale, carrying capacity, scarcity, and anthropogenic. His teaching includes classes on Food and the Environment (GEOG 130), Global Warming (L&S 70B), Nature and Culture (GEOG 203), and Contemporary Geographical Thought (GEOG 200A).

Nathan served as Geography Department Chair from 2013 to 2018 and as Associate Dean of Social Sciences in 2018-19. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Energy and Resources Group, and he is an incoming elected member of the Senate’s Divisional Council. He is affiliated faculty in the Berkeley Food Institute, the Energy and Resources Group, and the Range Graduate Group (which he chairs as of July 2020), and he is a council member for the Friends of the Bancroft Library. Beyond campus, he serves on the boards of the Malpai Borderlands Group and the Gold Rush Heritage Foundation, and he holds affiliations with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service-Jornada Experimental Range and its Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) and Long-Term Agroecological Research (LTAR) programs.