Appendix D
Workshop Speaker Biographical Sketches

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History and current chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. His research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia. Amrith’s areas of particular interest include environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health. Amrith is the recipient of the 2022 A.H. Heineken Prize for History, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. Amrith is the author of four books, including, most recently, Unruly Waters (2018).

Erin Coughlan de Perez bridges science, policy, and practice in her research on climate risk management around the world. She focuses on extreme events, exploring how droughts, floods, heatwaves, and other climate shocks can be anticipated before they happen. Coughlan de Perez works with humanitarian teams on the development of early action protocols to avoid disaster impacts, and she researches the adoption and effectiveness of climate change adaptation measures. Coughlan de Perez comes to the Feinstein Center at Tufts University from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, where she built a global climate science team and led the first Forecast-based Financing pilots in the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. Coughlan de Perez retains a technical advisor position at the Climate Centre to maintain links to humanitarian operations around the world. Coughlan de Perez was formerly an associate professor at Columbia University. Coughlan de Perez received her Ph.D. from VU University Amsterdam, her M.A. in climate and society from Columbia University, and her B.S. in environmental science and international development from McGill University. Coughlan de Perez is also a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. Her chapter is Decision-Making Options for Managing Risk, as part of the Working Group II on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

Saleemul Huq is the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and professor at the Independent University Bangladesh as well as Senior Associate of the International Institute on Environment and Development in the United Kingdom. In addition, he is the Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for the Climate Vulnerable Forum and also Senior Adviser on Locally Led Adaptation with the Global Center on Adaptation headquartered in the Netherlands. He is an expert in adaptation to climate change in the most vulnerable developing countries and has been a lead author of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; he also advises the Least Developed Countries group in the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change. In addition, he was affiliated with the UN Food System Summit for 2021 as co-chair of the Action Track 5 on Building Resilience to Vulnerabilities, Shocks & Stress. He has published hundreds of scientific as well as popular articles and was recognized as one of the top 20 global influencers on climate change policy in 2019 and top scientist from Bangladesh on climate change science. Recently he has been appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to combating international climate change.

Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He has broad interests in hydrology, climate dynamics, water resource systems analysis, risk management, and sustainability. He is motivated

by challenging questions at the intersection of these fields, especially where they have relevance to societal outcomes or to the advancement of science toward innovative application. His current research covers three major initiatives that are developed through the Columbia Water Center. The Global Water Sustainability Initiative addresses global water scarcity and risk. The Global Flood Initiative is motivated by the need to predict, mitigate, and manage floods at a global scale, recognizing their climate drivers and supply chain impacts. America’s Water seeks to develop sustainable water management and infrastructure design paradigms for the 21st century, recognizing the linkages between urban functioning, food, water, energy, and climate. These programmatic initiatives are backed by research on systems-level modeling of hydrology, climate, agronomy, and economics. Dr. Lall has pioneered the application of techniques from (1) nonlinear dynamical systems, (2) nonparametric methods of function estimation and their application to spatiotemporal dynamical systems, (3) hierarchical Bayesian models, (4) systems optimization and simulation, and (5) the study of multiscale climate variability and change as an integral component of hydrologic systems. He has published in journals that focus on hydrology, water resources, climate, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, risk, economic development, policy, and management science. He is the current editor-in-chief of the journal Water Security. He has been engaged in high-level public and scientific discussion through the media and the World Economic Forum, and with governments, foundations, development banks, and corporations interested in sustainability. He has served on several national and international panels. He was one of the originators of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science and is a past President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union.

Vimal Mishra is currently a professor in civil engineering and Earth sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar. Prior to joining IIT Gandhinagar, he completed his Ph.D. from Purdue University and postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Mishra’s research focuses on large-scale hydrologic modeling, remote sensing, and climate change impact assessment. Dr. Mishra’s research work has been published in leading journals including PNAS, Nature Geoscience, Geophysical Research Letters, and Water Resources Research. Dr. Mishra received the Devendra Lal Memorial Medal from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2021. He is a fellow of the AGU and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He is currently serving as an editor of Earth’s Future and associate editor of the Journal of Hydrology.

Kathy Pegion is an associate professor and Williams Chair in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Pegion’s research focuses on Earth system prediction on subseasonal to seasonal timescales using global weather and climate models, big data, and statistical and machine learning methodologies. Her research motto is “Better Forecasts. Better Decisions,” with the goal of improving forecasts from two weeks to several years in support of better decisionmaking. She leads a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–funded project called the Subseasonal Experiment. Dr. Pegion holds a Ph.D. in climate dynamics from George Mason University. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of Climate and co-chair of the National Center for Atmospheric Research Earth System Prediction Working Group.

Chris Richter is currently the Regional Migration, Environment and Climate Change Specialist at the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM’s) Regional Office in Bangkok. He was previously a Migration Officer with IOM’s Office to the United Nations in New York, a position he held since 2012. He has also spent time at IOM’s Headquarters in Geneva. In New York, Mr. Richter was responsible for the office’s sustainable development portfolio, coordinating IOM’s policy inputs to major United Nations (UN) processes and conferences, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development, the

SAMOA Pathway for Small Island Developing States, and the Habitat III New Urban Agenda, among others. Prior to joining IOM, Mr. Richter held several positions across the Australian government, covering a variety of thematic issues. He served as a Policy Officer with the UN and Human Rights Section of the Australian Agency for International Development, as well as on the Counter-Violent Extremism Taskforce at the Attorney-General’s Department. More recently, he was also an Assistant Director of the Strategic Policy Section of the former Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Mr. Richter studied international relations and international law at the University of Queensland, and has a master’s in international development from Deakin University in Melbourne. He has published a number of articles on migration and development, refugee law, and security policy.

Kanta Kumari Rigaud is a Lead Environmental Specialist at the World Bank with more than 25 years of professional experience in natural resources management, environmental management, and climate change adaptation. She joined the World Bank in 2004 and has worked in the Middle East North Africa Region and the Climate Change Group, and is currently working in the Africa Region as the Regional Climate Change Coordinator. In her current role, she led the development of the Next Generation Africa Climate Business Plan and continues to support the rollout and implementation of the plan and associated knowledge work, working with teams across the institution. She also works directly in Uganda and Kenya, including on their National Determined Contributions. Dr. Rigaud’s professional work has also focused on advancing climate policy and action at the practitioner level. On this front, she led the development of the World Bank’s climate and disaster risk screening tools to inform project design and national/sectoral plans and strategies as a contribution to climate mainstreaming across the institution. Recognizing the critical importance of climate-informed decision support, she went on to develop an online learning platform on weather and climate services resilient development for policymakers and practitioners on why and how to develop high-quality climate information products and services. As the World Bank team lead on the Africa Climate Resilient Investment Facility, a partnership with the African Union and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, she led the development of the Resilience Booster Tool, which seeks to strengthen the integration of climate risks and opportunities into the design and delivery of investments by enhancing the capacity of people, assets, institutions, and infrastructure. Dr. Rigaud holds a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia and was the recipient of the British Chevening Scholarship and the World Bank Graduate Scholarship award for her doctoral dissertation. She has a master of science in behavioral ecology from the University of Stirling, UK; a first-class bachelor of science honors degree in ecology; and a diploma in education from the University of Malaya. She has authored several publications and reports on natural resources, and environmental and climate issues.

Joyashree Roy is the Founder Director of the Centre on South and Southeast Asia Multidisciplinary Applied Research Network on Transforming Societies of Global South and the Inaugural Bangabandhu Chair Professor (2018–2022, July) at SERD, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. She is the founding advisor of the two multiyear projects at Jadavpur University: Global Change Programme and SYLFF-JU Programme. She is a former professor of economics in Jadavpur University, India. She is a national fellow of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research. She was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California. She is the recipient of the 2021 Paradigm Award of The Breakthrough Institute, United States. She was in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-2007 Nobel Peace Prize winning panel and continues as Coordinating Lead Author in the Fifth and Sixth Assessment cycles of Working Group III of the IPCC. She has been a chapter author of Global Energy Assessment, has been associated with the Stern Review Report and many

other global, national, and subnational reports. She was on the winning team of the 2012 Prince Sultan Bin Aziz creativity award for water. She has published more than 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, and authored and edited books. She is in the steering/advisory committee of several national and international science-policy interactive platforms and in editorial boards of many international journals. Her research interests include resource and environmental economics, economics of pollution and climate change, modeling industrial and other sectoral energy demand, economy-wide modeling exercises for deriving policy implications, water quality demand modeling, water, energy, carbon pricing, sustainable development, natural resource accounting, valuing environmental services, developmental and environmental issues relevant for informal sectors, and coastal ecosystem service evaluation. She features in the documentary “Juice: How Electricity Explains the World,” which explains among other things how developing countries are trying to bring people out of the dark and into the light and transforming lives.

Sarang Shidore is Director of Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks. He is also adjunct faculty at George Washington University, where he teaches a class on the geopolitics of climate change. His areas of research and analysis are geopolitical risk, grand strategy, climate security, and the energy transition, with a special emphasis on Asia and South Asia. In the field of climate policy and climate security, Shidore has collaborated and published with the Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Strategic Risks, Paulson Institute, and Woodwell Climate Research Center. He has more than 90 publications to his credit in journals, edited volumes, and media outlets in his areas of expertise, including in Energy Policy and Energy Research & Social Science. Prior to his current role at the Quincy Institute, Shidore was a senior research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and senior global analyst at the geopolitical risk firm Stratfor Inc., and previously also spent more than a decade in engineering and product management in the technology industry.

Jumaina Siddiqui is the Program Director, Global Security and International Affairs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She previously served as a senior program officer for South Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to that, she worked with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), where she served as the program manager for Pakistan, working on political party development, election observation and reforms, and increasing the participation of women and youth in the political process. Siddiqui was also a U.S.-Pakistan program fellow with the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, where her research focused on education reform efforts by political actors in Pakistan and the relationship between donors, civil society, politicians, and the government to move these reforms forward. Prior to joining NDI, she worked at Global Communities on a U.S. Agency for International Development–funded project to increase stability in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan by providing improved livelihood and economic growth opportunities. Siddiqui has extensive experience in program design and management as well as policy research and analysis. She has held positions at the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative focusing on programs in Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Thailand, as well as thematic programs related to media legal defense and access to justice in Asia; at the Stimson Center examining nontraditional security issues in South Asia; and at the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University, conducting research on international human trafficking and managing a training program on human trafficking in the United States. Siddiqui holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University and a master’s degree from New York University, where her work focused on democracy promotion and the rule of law in the Muslim world, culminating in a thesis on rebuilding justice systems in postconflict Afghanistan. She also holds a graduate certificate in environmental policy and management from the University of Denver.