Developing a Strategy to Evaluate the National Climate Assessment (2024)
Chapter: Appendix A: Committee Members
Appendix A
Committee Members
Kai N. Lee (Chair) is the principal of Owl of Minerva, LLC, a consulting firm working with philanthropic foundations, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Dr. Lee is an adviser on environmental DNA to Oceankind Labs. He is also a fellow of the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University. Dr. Lee is Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies, emeritus, at Williams College, and he served as a program officer for science at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Compass and Gyroscope (1993) and co-author, with Howarth and Freudenburg, of Humans in the Landscape (2012). At the Packard Foundation, Dr. Lee developed means of targeting funding to achieve near-term practical results in conservation. Earlier in his career, he was a White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of Defense, and a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Dr. Lee has also served on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He has served on more than a dozen National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees and was the founding vice-chair of the National Academies committee to advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Dr. Lee served in that role during the committee’s review of the third National Climate Assessment, and he was a chapter review editor for the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Dr. Lee holds a degree in experimental physics from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in the same field from Princeton.
Ann M. Gallagher is a science education coordinator for the National Park Service (NPS). She is serving as a governor-appointed commissioner for the Maryland Commission on Parks and Recreation. Other recent experience includes being temporarily embedded in the Climate Change Response Program for the NPS. Gallagher has served for nearly 20 years as the instructor of record teaching undergraduate courses in Earth science and biology. In her federal, nonprofit, and educational research positions, Gallagher navigates between participants, engaged groups, and institutions creating novel science products. For other nonprofit organizations, she has led numerous program and organizational evaluations. Gallagher’s areas of expertise include science education, organizational and program management and evaluation, outreach and engagement, watershed and forest ecology, policy drafting and implementation, executive management, and science communication. She holds a graduate certificate in environmental policy from the University of Massachusetts, is an Ecological Society of America senior ecologist, an International Society of Arboriculture certified arborist, and a Project Management Institute program management professional. Gallagher holds an M.S. degree from the University of Maryland and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in public administration and policy at Old Dominion University’s Strome College of Business School of Public Service, uniting climate change science and land management planning.
Matthew Gribble is an environmental epidemiologist and diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology (DABT) currently appointed as the associate chief for research in occupational, environmental & climate medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has over a decade of experience in community-engaged and tribal environmental health research on environmental exposures that may contribute to environmental health disparities. Dr. Gribble has provided expert service on topics pertaining to planetary health, climate change and health, and oceans and human health to the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. He serves on the National Harmful Algal Blooms Committee and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology Anti-Racism Task Force. Dr. Gribble is co-editor of Oceans and Human Health, a textbook published in 2023. He has previously served as a science advisor to the United States Geological Survey and has received awards for the rigor and creativity of his research from the Universities Council on Water Resources and the Society of Toxicology Metals Specialty Section. In addition to his research program in the United States, Dr. Gribble also has contributed to international climate change adaptation research in Bangladesh. He holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University.
Scott Kalafatis is the deputy university director of the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center affiliated with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. Previously, Scott was an assistant professor of sustainability at Chatham University, a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at Dickinson College, a National Science Foundation ethical STEM postdoctoral researcher with the College of Menominee Nation, and a researcher with Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments. Dr. Kalafatis is a social scientist with a research background focused on understanding collaborations between scientists and decision-makers, including how these collaborations contribute to decisions informed by climate science, what the ethical implications of these collaborations are, and how to train and support scientists pursuing them. He has leveraged training methods and research design strategies from across a variety of social science and applied fields to evaluate the use of climate science in decisions made by local governments, tribal governments, and resource managers throughout the United States. Dr. Kalafatis holds M.A.s in environmental policy and urban planning, and a Ph.D. in resource policy and behavior from the University of Michigan.
Jessica Kronstadt is the program director at the Planetary Health Alliance, a global consortium of organizations committed to understanding and addressing the impacts of environmental change on human health and well-being. Previously, she was the vice president for research and product development at the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) where she led PHAB’s research and evaluation portfolio as well as the development of the most recent version of the national, consensus-based accreditation standards for state, tribal, local, and territorial health departments. Throughout her career, Kronstadt has led or advised numerous evaluations of public health and other health initiatives. For more than a decade, she led evaluation activities to determine the impact of health department accreditation. Her other evaluations of complex programs include the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Infrastructure Grant and the Health Information Technology and Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act workforce development program. Kronstadt has served as chair of both the Montgomery County, Maryland, Commission on Health and the Academy Health Public Health Systems Research Interest Group. She received her M.P.P. from Georgetown University and her B.A. from Amherst College.
Glynis Lough is an affiliate at the Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI), where she also directs two collaboratives: the Practitioner Exchange for Effective Response to Sea Level Rise and the Science for Climate Action Network. Previous positions have included vice president, grants for the National Geographic Society; deputy director and research director, Food & Environment Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists; chief of staff for the Third National Climate Assessment with the U.S. Global Change Research Program; and American Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Air, Office of Policy Analysis and Review. Dr. Lough works with AGCI to advance collaborative learning processes that accelerate climate solutions, supporting effective co-development of practical, vetted, real-world knowledge. Throughout her work, she seeks to solve complicated issues by centering humans’ lived experiences and co-developing knowledge to achieve meaningful outcomes. With a background in engineering, Dr. Lough brings a
wealth of experience in air quality, climate change, food systems, social justice, public health, and conservation. She holds a Ph.D. in environmental chemistry and technology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Michelle Miro is a senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She has a broad portfolio of work across climate resilience and adaptation and disaster recovery for infrastructure, with a focus on the water sector. Dr. Miro’s research supports international, federal, and local emergency, infrastructure, and resource management agencies with climate adaptation, disaster resilience and recovery, and water resources planning. Her recent projects have developed national and regional climate risk assessments of U.S. critical infrastructure systems, as well as climate services that support local to regional entities interpreting and acting on climate information. Dr. Miro holds an M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ariane Pinson is the research social scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Albuquerque District. She conducts climate resilience planning for both civil and military projects, advises on climate policy and guidance for USACE and the Department of the Army, and develops data and decision support tools to support climate resilience planning across the Department of Defense. Dr. Pinson has a sustained research focus on climate change impacts to landscapes, ecosystems, and human adaptation and serves as the federal coordinating lead for the water chapter for the Fifth National Climate Assessment. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of New Mexico and a B.A. in geography.
Urooj Raja is an assistant professor at the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago in the Department of Advocacy and Social Change where her focus is on the human dimensions of environmental problems. Dr. Raja is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on how the general public engages with and responds to climate change. Her recent work has been published in Scientific Reports and Environmental Communication. Dr. Raja is currently a review editor for the journal Frontiers: Science and Environmental Communication and sits on the Executive Section of the American Geophysical Union’s Science and Society Section and the Environmental Communication section of the National Communication Association. She has previous work experience in the field of environmental philanthropy (the Solutions Project), polling behavior (Pew Research Center), and local and national decision-making bodies (New York State Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives). Dr. Raja holds a Ph.D. in environmental studies and an M.A. in environmental sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder and a B.A. in history from Princeton University.
Carlos Rodriguez-Franco is a senior forester with the Research and Development arm of the U.S. Forest Service and served as the deputy chief from 2016 to 2018. Dr. Rodriguez-Franco worked for Mexico’s National Institute of Forestry, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Research for 25 years and served as the general director from 1996 to 2000. His work focuses on forest inventories, silviculture, forest management, carbon sequestration, biochar, plant production techniques, forest plantations, and agroforestry systems. Dr. Rodriguez-Franco has taken leadership training at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and with Dialogos. He was awarded the category of national researcher by the National System of Researchers in Mexico from 1987 to 2000 for conducting outstanding research, the results of which have benefited Mexican technology and have contributed to increased productivity and improved basic knowledge. Dr. Rodriguez-Franco holds a Ph.D. in forest sciences from Yale University.
Kathleen Segerson is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. She is an environmental economist, with a strong interest in collaborative interdisciplinary work. Dr. Segerson’s research within economics is primarily applied theory focused on the incentive effects of alternative environmental and conservation policy instruments, with applications to groundwater contamination, hazardous waste management, land use regulation, climate change, nonpoint pollution from agriculture, and protection of marine species. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and a fellow
at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm. Dr. Segerson has held numerous editorial positions and has served on a number of advisory boards, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and the Committee on Valuing the Protection of Ecological Systems and Services. She has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Advisory Committee for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and on the review panel for the Third National Climate Assessment. Dr. Segerson holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.
Kristin Timm is a research assistant professor at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Dr. Timm’s expertise is in science and climate change communication and the people and processes at the interface of science and society. She is a member of the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center leadership team, directing research and activities related to communication and actionable science. Prior to her time at UAF, Dr. Timm worked and studied with the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and spent over a decade working as a science education project manager and professional science communicator in Alaska. Her dissertation investigated news coverage of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and the factors that influenced it. Dr. Timm has received several awards for her work, including the U.S. Geological Survey Eugene M. Shoemaker Communication Award for effectiveness communicating complex scientific concepts. She previously served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee to review the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Dr. Timm has a Ph.D. in communication from George Mason University and a M.Sc. in interdisciplinary studies and a B.A. in rural development: land, resources, and environmental management, both from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
