Kathleen Treseder

Candidate for City Council Member, Irvine, District 6 · Councilmember, City of Irvine/Educator

Kathleen Treseder holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and has served since 2003 as the Howard A. Schneiderman Endowed Chair and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine, where she leads an internationally recognized research program on how climate change affects endangered ecosystems. She has published more than 120 articles in scientific journals, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Ecological Society of America, and received the Ecological Society of America's 2024 Robert H. MacArthur Award and the British Ecological Society's 2022 Marsh Award for Climate Change Research. Her research has been covered by the BBC, NPR, and Discover Magazine, among other outlets. Outside academia, she co-founded the grassroots group OC Clean Power, which pushed successfully for Irvine to adopt renewable-energy programs, and served on the city's Green Ribbon Committee working on plastic pollution and air quality. In 2017, as a UC Irvine department chair, she led the effort that resulted in a professor accused of sexual harassment being banned from campus and prompted improvements to victim support. She and her husband created the Treseder Randerson Fund to support women and marginalized groups in Orange County and co-founded 'You Are Not Alone,' which supports survivors of sexual violence on local campuses. She was sworn in to the Irvine City Council in December 2022.

Treseder frames her campaign around making Irvine a green city that leaves no one behind: clean power with good-paying long-term clean-energy jobs, a stable water supply even under future droughts, and holding polluters accountable in pursuit of clean air, clean water and a stable climate. She wants the city to secure affordable housing for working families, young professionals, seniors and veterans, and supports union labor on housing projects. On transportation she calls for green public transportation, better traffic engineering, and bikeable, walkable neighborhoods. On the economy she wants to help small and local businesses recover from the pandemic while supporting collective bargaining, workers' rights and prevailing wages, and says she will listen to marginalized groups and act on their needs.

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