Integrating the Human Sciences to Scale Societal Responses to Environmental Change: Proceedings of a Workshop (2023)
Chapter: Appendix B: Committee Members and Workshop Speakers
Appendix B
Committee Members and Workshop Speakers
COMMITTEE
ROBYN S. WILSON (chair) is a professor of risk analysis and decision science in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses primarily on how decisions under risk and uncertainty are made at the individual level. Wilson is also interested in the development of risk communication and decision-support tools to inform decision making. Her current research focus is on adaptation to climate-exacerbated hazards (e.g., wildfire, water quality), and what motivates and constrains different land-use and land-management decisions on private and public lands. Wilson is the current past president of the Society for Risk Analysis and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Resilient America Roundtable and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Board of Scientific Counselors Social and Community Science Subcommittee. She is a former member of the National Academies’ Board on Environmental Change and Society and the EPA Chartered Science Advisory Board. Wilson received her B.A. in environmental studies from Denison University and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in environment and natural resources from The Ohio State University.
DAVID L. ALBRIGHT is a University Distinguished Research Professor and the Hill Crest Foundation Endowed Chair in Mental Health Research at The University of Alabama. He is committed to public policy and administrative leadership aimed at improving the health, well-being, safety, and prosperity of vulnerable populations, rural and underserved communities, and U.S. military veterans. Albright is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and the National Academies of Practice in Social Work. He received his M.S.W. and Ph.D. in social work from Florida State University.
GUANGQING CHI is a professor of rural sociology and demography and also the director of the Computational and Spatial Analysis Core at Pennsylvania State University. His expertise is in socio-environmental systems, seeking to understand the interactions between human populations and the built and natural environments, and to identify important social, environmental, infrastructural, and institutional assets to help vulnerable populations adapt and become resilient to environmental changes. Chi’s work has led to innovative methods for identifying and measuring human-environment hotspots and spatial methods for population forecasting. His current methodological focus is to build an infrastructure for collecting, integrating, and analyzing multidimensional and multiscale data,
including big social data. His research has been supported by more than $50 million in grants through the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Social Science Research Council, including the $3 million transdisciplinary POLARIS project, to investigate environmental migration and food security in response to climate change. He has published more than 140 publications including more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles contributing to foundational advances in environmental demography and the population-infrastructure nexus. He obtained a Ph.D. in environmental demography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
SUSAN CLAYTON is a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster. Her research looks at people’s relationships with the natural environment, how such relationships are socially constructed, and how a healthy relationship with nature can be promoted, particularly in informal education contexts. Clayton has written extensively about the impacts of climate change on psychosocial well-being and has developed a scale to assess climate anxiety. In addition to serving as the editor of the Cambridge Elements series in Applied Social Psychology, she is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Social Justice Research, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and the Journal of Zoological and Botanical Gardens. Clayton was a lead author on the sixth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contributing to the chapter focused on climate change impacts on health and well-being. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association; the Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology; the Society for Personality and Social Psychology; the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; and the International Association for Applied Psychology. Clayton has a Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale University.
JACK DEWAARD is the scientific director of Social and Behavioral Science Research at the Population Council, an international resource nongovernmental organization. A human migration scholar, his research focuses on international and internal migration systems and networks, climate and environmental migration and displacement, and inequality and incorporation. DeWaard is a member of the editorial board of the journal Demography, and he is an active member of the Population Association of America. DeWaard previously conducted community needs assessments and in resource development for the Oregon Child Development Coalition, a nonprofit agency that provides early childhood education and related services for the children and families of migrant and seasonal farm workers in Oregon. He earned his B.A. in sociology and philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, M.A. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Ph.D. in sociology—with concentrations in demography and ecology, race and ethnic studies, and research methods—from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
KRISTINA DOUGLASS is an associate professor of climate at Columbia University and a Smithsonian Institution research associate. She is an archaeologist who investigates the co-evolution of people and landscapes, particularly in contexts of climate and environmental change. Douglass’s work is grounded in collaborations with local, Indigenous, and descendant (LID) communities as equal partners in the coproduction of science, and the recording, preservation, and dissemination of LID knowledge. She has directed the Morombe Archaeological Project, based in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area of southwest Madagascar. The project has expanded understanding of human response to climate change by combining diverse approaches, including archaeology, oral history, remote sensing, and machine learning. Douglass and her collaborators aim to contribute long-term perspectives on human-environment interactions to public debates, planning, and policymaking on the issues of climate change, conservation, and sustainability. Douglass is a Carnegie Fellow and a National Geographic Explorer, and was previously appointed Sherwin Early Career Professor at Penn State University and Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian. She earned her A.B. in classical archaeology at Dartmouth College and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale University.
JODY HOFFER GITTELL is a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, faculty director of the Relational Coordination Collaborative, and co-founder and board member of Relational Coordination Analytics. To understand how stakeholders achieve their desired outcomes in coordination with each other, she developed Relational Coordination Theory, proposing that highly interdependent work is most effectively coordinated through
relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect, supported by frequent, timely, accurate, problem-solving communication. The Relational Model of Organizational Change shows how stakeholders can design structural, relational, and work-process interventions to support more effective coordination of their work. Gittell is currently exploring the relational dynamics of multistakeholder change in ecosystems in multiple sectors around the world. She currently serves as treasurer for Seacoast National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on the board of trustees for Greater Seacoast Community Health, on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review, on the leadership team of the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management, as academic fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Information Systems Research, and as chair of the Brandeis Faculty Senate. She received her Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
STEPHEN H. LINDER is a professor in the Department of Management, Policy and Community Health at the School of Public Health of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He serves as director of the Institute for Health Policy and co-director of Community Engagement at the Gulf Coast Center for Precision Environmental Research. His current work focuses on community-based assessment of health needs and disparities, and environmental and cumulative risks. Linder’s earlier work dealt with public policy design, policy implementation, and environmental policy. He is a University of Texas System Distinguished Teaching Professor and a fellow at the Kenneth I. Shine Academy of Health Science Education. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Environmental Change and Society. Linder’s doctorate is in political science with subsequent training in conflict resolution and mediation at the University of Texas School of Law.
RAJUL (RAJ) PANDYA is the vice president of Community Science at American Geophysical Union (AGU). He invites everyone to be part of guiding and doing science, especially people from historically marginalized communities, so that the sciences can contribute to a world where all people and nature can thrive, now and in the future. Pandya chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning, serves on the boards for Public Lab and the Anthropocene Alliance, and is a member of the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment. He helped launch the Resilience Dialogues—a public-private partnership that uses facilitated online dialogues to advance community resilience. Pandya was a founding board member of the Citizen Science Association and served as Education and Human Resource Commissioner for the American Meteorological Society. Before joining AGU, he led education, engagement, and diversity programs connected to the National Center for Atmospheric Research; led an international research and development project that used weather data to better manage meningitis in Africa; and held a faculty position at West Chester State University. Pandya got his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, exploring how large thunderstorms grow and persist.
ALAÍ REYES-SANTOS is a founding member and the associate director of the Mellon Foundation-funded Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice, and a professor of practice at the University of Oregon’s School of Law. Previously she was an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Reyes-Santos’s projects co-create knowledge with community and university partners and disseminate environmental research in accessible formats through public scholarship, media interventions, op-eds, and digital platforms. She has recently co-created the Oregon Water Futures (OWF) Collaborative and the Healers Project, two multidisciplinary initiatives through which the human sciences support storytelling, community empowerment, leadership development, public education, and scientific research that directly impact how historically underserved communities address climate and environmental change. Through OWF’s storytelling project, community voices usually absent from conversations about water infrastructure updates were at the center of state planning with long-term impacts on public health. Currently, the Mellon Foundation funded the Healers Project to elevate Indigenous and Black approaches to environmental challenges in the Pacific Northwest. Reyes-Santos received the Excellence in Teaching Sustainability Award for her deployment of multidisciplinary student teams to address environmental problems with community partners. She holds a B.A. in humanities, an M.A. in Spanish, and a Ph.D. in literature.
FERNANDO SANCHEZ-TRIGUEROS is the director of the Elouise Cobell Land and Culture Institute and an assistant professor with the departments of Native American studies and environmental studies at the University of Montana. Previously, he has been an assistant professor of practice in geographic information systems at the University of Arizona; a geography instructor and project manager in tribal geographic information systems at the University of Montana; and a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service and the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution (Spain). Sanchez-Trigueros’s academic interests focus on understanding the human dimensions of climate change, supporting Indigenous uses of information technologies for climate change adaptation, and tailoring computational methods for environmental and social science analytics. He accumulated more than 15 years of experience in higher education and nearly 10 years facilitating and overseeing research collaborations between universities, tribal governments, and the federal government. Sanchez-Trigueros is affiliated with the American Association of Geographers and the National Wilderness Stewardship Alliance. He has a bachelor’s degree in history; four master’s degrees in human evolution, applied statistics, geographic information systems, and management information systems; a Ph.D. in Earth sciences and archaeology; and graduate certificates in business analytics, information security, and operations research (i.e., systems optimization).
LINDA SILKA is a social and community psychologist by training, with much of her work focusing on building community-university research partnerships. She has several decades of experience in leading community-university research partnerships on climate change, environmental issues, economic development, and environmental health issues. Silka was the former director of the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and is now a senior fellow at the University of Maine’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. Before moving to the University of Maine, Silka was a faculty member for three decades at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she directed the Center for Family, Work, Community; served as the special assistant to the provost for Community Outreach and Partnerships; and was professor of regional economic and social development. Silka has written extensively on the challenges and opportunities of building research partnerships with diverse groups and has consulted internationally on how to build community-university research partnerships. In addition to her teaching and research duties, Silka is a member and fellow of the American Psychological Association and recent president and fellow of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. She has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Housing and Urban Development, National Science Foundation, National Park Service, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
ARIANNE TEHERANI is professor of medicine and education scientist, director for program evaluation and education continuous quality improvement, and founding co-director of the University of California Center for Climate Health and Equity. She leads research on educational equity and the role of education as a core solution to climate and health crises. Teherani examines outcomes of endeavors to train health professionals to educate students and patients about climate health justice, the role of health systems science education in decarbonization, and the carbon footprint of education practices. She co-instituted the University of California and California State University’s inaugural Climate Justice Symposium for Transforming Education to integrate climate justice into education and build community engagement through just and transformative curriculum and pedagogies. Teherani’s research has been featured in venues such as National Public Radio, KTVU, and the Huffington Post. She received the University of California, San Francisco Faculty Sustainability Award and the University of California Sustainability Award. Teherani was named the University of California Faculty Climate Action Champion—an award given to one faculty member at each University of California campus in recognition of their contribution to the sustainability mission. Teherani earned a master’s and doctorate in education from the University of Southern California and completed a fellowship in higher education at the University of British Columbia.
SPEAKERS
LISA ARKIN is the executive director of Beyond Toxics, Oregon’s first statewide environmental justice nonprofit, where she provides innovative policy leadership. Following her career in higher education at both Stanford University and the University of Oregon, Arkin became dedicated to placing social justice at the forefront of all environmental protection policies. As an example, Arkin has steered innovative community-based research, stewarded the adoption of the 2021 Oregon Environmental Justice Framework by the State Legislature, introduced some of the nation’s most protective pesticide policies at the state and local levels, and advocated for climate justice criteria in land- and forestry-management regulations.
SHAHZEEN ATTARI performs research focused on people’s judgments and decisions about climate change and resource use. Some of her research has investigated how people think about energy and water use, how people conceptualize water systems, and how the carbon footprint of climate communicators affects their audience’s policy support. Among other projects, she is currently studying how to use stories to fuse facts and feelings to motivate action on climate change. She is an associate professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington.
DEBORAH BALK is a professor of public affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) and director of the CUNY Institute of Demographic Research. She was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Balk is an expert on population-climate interactions. Using a spatial demographic lens (combining population and remote-sensing data), she studies a wide range of demographic and health outcomes, poverty, and vulnerability. Balk is a pioneer in the spatial modeling of urbanization and was the lead developer of the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project and codeveloper of the first global Low Elevation Coastal Zone data sets, which allowed for the estimation of urban population at risk of climate-change hazards. She has published widely on the global, national, and local scales. She currently serves as co-chair on the New York City Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment, a member of the Society and Economy Working Group of the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment, a member of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Population. Balk received her Ph.D. in demography from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan.
GARY BELKIN is director of the Billion Minds Project at Columbia University and chair of COP2 (cop2.org). A psychiatrist who approaches mental health as a building block of social policy and progress, he recently founded Billion Minds as a “think-action tank.” The intention of Billion Minds is to link mental health to problems of great scale, specifically to the climate crisis, and to safeguard sustainable societies through a humane social climate. COP2 was one outcome of that work—a global network aligned about converging growing activity and learning on climate-psychological resilience connections and putting them to global scale. An initial effort from that is to produce an implementation roadmap for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Race to Resilience, to incorporate the goal of building capacity to promote those supports to four billion people by 2030. Belkin is also the former Executive Deputy Commissioner in the New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where he led the Division of Mental Hygiene and its development and implementation of the innovative NYC-wide public mental health initiative, ThriveNYC. Before joining city government, he was medical director for behavioral health across the Health and Hospitals Corporation of the City of New York and served as founding editor in chief of the open-access journal Global Mental Health. As director of the New York University Program in Global Mental Health, Belkin partnered with other groups globally to test and scale community-led models of mental health promotion and access in less-resourced countries that are now widely used. A graduate of Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he also earned his undergraduate degree, Belkin earned his M.P.H. at Harvard School of Public Health and a doctorate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
LYNNY BROWN is a partner at Healthy Environments at Willamette Partnership. Growing up in densely populated Bangkok, Thailand, Brown found serenity and healing in the small green space at her apartment complex. This experience of access to nature drives her work: to improve people’s well-being by connecting them to healthy environments. Brown provides collaborative leadership, policy expertise, and coordination support for projects at the intersection of health and the environment. She works to center community voices while providing the structure needed to keep diverse groups moving forward together. Brown draws from her master’s degree in public health and community organizing experience to support initiatives such as the Oregon Water Futures Collaborative, Oregon Health & Outdoors Initiative, and Oregon Rural Community Schoolyards. She is an alumna of the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon’s Climate, Health, and Housing Institute and joins a strong cohort of community leaders organizing for systemic change to address the root causes of environmental justice issues.
DIRELLE CALICA is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and is of Warm Springs, Wasco, Yakama, Molalla, and Snoqualmie tribal descent. Calica has more than 25 years of experience as a field, legislative, policy, planning, and regulatory advisor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office-District of Oregon, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and various Indian tribes and tribal organizations. She has extensive professional experience in intergovernmental affairs, hydro system planning, resource conservation, and tribal energy policy. Calica has also served as a Mark O. Hatfield Congressional Fellow in the U.S. Senate. She currently serves as the director of Portland State University’s Institute for Tribal Government and as the Member, Board of Directors Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians’ Energy & Water Program. Calica is the cofounder and coordinator of the Changing Currents: Tribal Water Summit program for tribal leaders and youth. She is the managing partner of Kanim Associates LLC, a Native American-owned professional consulting firm. Calica serves on the Oregon Native American Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.
SARA CONSTANTINO is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She works broadly on social and environmental policy and decision making. Constantino’s research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual, institutional, and ecological factors on perceptions, policy preferences, and resilience to extreme events or shocks. In particular, recent studies look at the role of polarization, social norms, and governance in stimulating or stifling support for climate action. She also works on the impacts and politics of basic income programs. Before starting at Northeastern, Constantino was an associate research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a lecturer at the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Before this, she was a senior research fellow in Guaranteed Income with the Jain Family Institute and a founding editor at Nature Human Behavior. Constantino received her bachelor’s degree in economics from McGill University; a master’s degree in economics from University College London; and a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences, with a focus on learning and decision making in dynamic environments, from New York University.
SHANNON DOSEMAGEN (she/her) directs the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP). OEDP focuses on building spaces to grow the global conversation on environmental and climate data access and use. Previously, she cofounded and served for a decade as executive director of Public Lab, a community that uses open approaches to support people in asking and answering environmental questions. Dosemagen is a cofounder of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware and a collaborator in the Open Climate community. For her work, she has been awarded fellowships with the Shuttleworth and Claneil Foundations and at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Dosemagen currently serves on the boards of Code for Science and Society, the Open Science Hardware Foundation, and the U.S. National Parks Conservation Association, and previously chaired the National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology and the Citizen Science Association.
KRISTIE L. EBI is a professor in the Center for Health and the Global Environment in the School of Public Health, University of Washington. She has been conducting research on the health risks of climate variability and change for more than 25 years. Ebi’s research focuses on estimating the current and future health risks of climate change, designing adaptation programs to reduce those risks, and quantifying the health co-benefits of mitigation
policies. She has provided technical support to multiple countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific in managing climate change-related risks. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a master of public health in epidemiology, and two years of postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Ebi edited four books on aspects of climate change and has more than 250 peer-reviewed publications.
CHRIS FREY is the assistant administrator for research and development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), effective May 2022. He also serves as the agency science advisor. Before Frey’s confirmation, he served the Office of Research and Development (ORD) as the deputy assistant administrator for science policy. Before joining EPA, he was the Glenn E. and Phyllis J. Futrell Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University. Frey’s research includes measurement and modeling of human exposure to air pollution, measurement and modeling of vehicle emissions, and applications of probabilistic and sensitivity analysis methods to emissions estimation, risk assessment, and technology assessment. He was a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science/EPA Environmental Science and Engineering. Frey served as an exposure modeling advisor in ORD’s National Exposure Research Laboratory. He was a member of the EPA Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Scientific Advisory Panel, a member of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), chair of CASAC, and a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board. Frey was a member of the CASAC Particulate Matter Review Panel; under his leadership, the panel reconvened as the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel. He was president of the Society for Risk Analysis. Frey has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia, an M.E. in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Ph.D. in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
STEVEN C. HAYES is a Nevada Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. An author of 48 books and 700 scientific articles, he is the developer of Relational Frame Theory, an account of human higher cognition, and has guided its extension to acceptance and commitment therapy or training (ACT), a popular evidence-based form of psychological intervention that fosters greater psychological flexibility and has been shown in more than 1,000 randomized trials to improve mental and behavioral health and social wellness in a wide range of areas. Of relevance to this workshop, ACT self-help is distributed worldwide by the World Health Organization to address stress from any source including war and natural disasters (bit.ly/WHO_ACT), and psychological flexibility principles have been combined with Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning core design principles in a program called Prosocial, which is used widely to foster group cooperation including in areas of climate change. Hayes’s first book was Environmental Problems/Behavioral Solutions. Research.com ranks him as the 63rd highest-impact psychologist worldwide.
JESSE M. KEENAN is the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate at the School of Architecture, Tulane University. As a globally recognized thought leader, Keenan’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change adaptation and the built environment, including aspects of design, engineering, regulation, planning, and financing. Keenan formerly served as the director and area head for real estate and built environment on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and as the research director of the Center for Urban Real Estate on the faculty of Columbia University. Keenan represents the United States as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and currently serves as an appointed author for the U.S. National Climate Assessment. Keenan has held various federal government appointments where he has supported climate change research and policy at the White House, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, and Defense. Among other popular recognitions, Keenan coined the concept of “climate gentrification,” which has stimulated an active public discourse on the distributional equity of who pays and who benefits from societal adaptations to climate change. Keenan’s work on domestic climate migration has been widely observed to have influenced consumer behaviors, particularly in Duluth, Minnesota. Keenan holds degrees in the law and science of the built environment, including a Ph.D. from the Delft University of Technology.
MARK LUBELL is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis, and the director of its Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. He studies cooperation problems and decision making in environmental, agricultural, and public policy. Through the application of social science theory and research methods, Lubell uses his work to provide practical results and recommendations to real policy and decision makers. His research topics include water management, sustainable agriculture, adaptive decision making, climate change policy, local government policy, transportation behavior, plant disease management, invasive species, and policy/social network analysis. Following a natural science model of scientific inquiry, Lubell’s long-term research agenda is to discover common principles of cooperation that can be observed and tested in all three modes of research: theory, experiment, and field.
EZRA MARKOWITZ is associate professor of environmental decision making in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research, teaching, and outreach focus on the intersection of decision making, persuasive communication, public engagement with science, and environmental sustainability. Markowitz is particularly interested in the practical application of behavioral science to improve individuals’ and communities’ environmental decision making; he also has deep expertise in the field of climate change communication and public engagement. He is the author of more than five dozen peer-reviewed research papers, book chapters, and reports, including the 2015 Connecting on Climate Guide to climate change communication. At UMass Amherst, Markowitz teaches courses on environmental decision making and public engagement and communication for scientists. He holds a Ph.D. in environmental sciences, studies & policy and an M.S. in psychology from the University of Oregon, as well as a B.A. in psychology from Vassar College. Markowitz previously held appointments as an Earth Institute Fellow at Columbia University and as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University; he is a fellow with the FrameWorks Institute and a former president of the Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology.
JESSICA MURPHY has worked in the educational arena for almost 20 years. Her experiences started as a part-time lecturer of industrial technology while completing her Ph.D at Mississippi State University. After she completed her doctorate degree, Murphy worked with the Mississippi Department of Education in Management Information Systems. She has also taught in the Department of Industrial Systems and Technology at Jackson State University. Murphy has successfully matriculated through the ranks from assistant professor to full professor at this research-intensive institution. She became the principal investigator and project director of the Community Resilience Project at Jackson State (through support from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security-Coastal Resilience Center). Their vision is to equip Mississippi’s underserved communities with up-to-date skills for better preparedness for natural disasters to minimize loss of life and property, thus building resilient communities. Murphy completed her B.S. degree in industrial technology at Alcorn State University, an M.S. in technology, and a Ph.D. in technology from Mississippi State University.
ABBY REYES directs Community Resilience Projects in the Office of Sustainability at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The projects foster community-driven academic partnerships that honor and build community and climate resilience. At UCI’s School of Law, Reyes also teaches a seminar on Law and Social Movements: Race, Place, and Climate Change. Current and recent projects include directing Community-Academic Partnerships to Advance Equity-Focused Climate Action, a 15-month participatory action research training for 11 community-academic partnerships in California to advance equity-focused climate solutions; co-convening the Just Transition Lawyering Institute, a 14-week training for practicing attorneys who support Black and Indigenous communities and low-income communities of color in advancing just transition solutions; and walking alongside Cooperación Santa Ana together with a wider collaborative of community-based organizations that are building local solidarity economy infrastructure in southern California. Reyes also participates in Colombia’s post-civil war Truth and Recognition processes stemming from her ongoing accompaniment of the U’wa Indigenous peoples in their decades-long assertion of dignity against big oil. She previously directed the UCI Sustainability Initiative and was a co-principal investigator of the FloodRISE project, leading the Research Integration and Impact Team. She co-chaired the Faculty Engagement and Education Working Group of the University of California (UC) Global
Climate Leadership Council and co-founded UCI’s Sustainability Resource Center. She has provided facilitation and design services for the UC-California State University Knowledge Action Network on Transformative Climate and Sustainability Education, UCI Salton Sea Initiative, UCI OCEANS, UCI Research Justice Learning Community, Nexus 2014: Environmental Health and Justice, and the Borrego Stewardship Council. She also trains UC faculty, staff, community collaborators, and student activists in community leadership for climate resilience statewide. In response to the pandemic, Reyes co-convened the Orange County Health Equity COVID-19 Community Academic Partnership, co-producing the first health equity-focused contact tracing workshop series to build community-driven COVID-19 response within the region’s hardest-hit communities. Earlier in her career, the Scholar and the Feminist Conference of Barnard College named Reyes a “Model of Resistance” for her work directing the U’wa Defense Project, a legal and community organizing effort, and her work with rural fishing and farming communities through the Environmental Legal Assistance Center in the southern Philippines as a Henry Luce Scholar. Reyes completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and her J.D. at UC Berkeley Law. She clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and recently finished her term co-chairing the board of directors of EarthRights International. She is a partner in the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners and a participant in Movement Strategy Center’s transitions labs and collective acceleration learning communities. Reyes received UCI’s Excellence in Leadership Award and a California Higher Education Sustainability Best Practices Award. She has a TEDx talk on How to Come Home.
SHINA ROBINSON is a bridge builder between passing transformative climate, energy, and housing policies, and implementing state policy through local models of Just Transition and Energy Democracy, rooted in local design and decision making of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network’s (APEN) immigrant and refugee leaders. She leads policy and political education training, community-engagement processes, joint advocacy, and coordination with local and state coalitions to advance these projects and collective vision. Robinson’s current focus is on implementing policies, accessing investments, and engaging APEN communities as decision makers to build community-based climate resilience hubs in Oakland and Richmond. She has served in many roles at APEN, but her deep commitment to environmental justice at the intersection of human rights, health, and equity started from a young age between visiting family in the Philippines and growing up in the shadow of a Los Angeles area oil refinery. She took on human rights and climate disaster relief campaigns while pursuing an undergraduate degree in international studies and political science at California State University, Long Beach.
GABRIELLE WONG-PARODI is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Social Sciences Division, and a Center Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research focuses on applying behavioral decision research methods to address challenges associated with global environmental change. Wong-Parodi seeks to understand the psychosocial and contextual factors that influence people’s responses to environmental change—especially extremes—over time, with a particular focus on those communities that have been historically marginalized or disproportionately impacted by climate change. She also uses behavioral decision science approaches to create and evaluate evidence-based strategies for informed decision making, with a particular focus on building resilience and promoting sustainability in the face of a changing climate. Wong-Parodi has a background in climate change adaptation and mitigation, energy technologies and resources, extreme weather events, and low-carbon technologies. She is on the advisory committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to the U.S. Global Change Research Program and recently served as a committee member on the American Psychological Association’s Climate Task Force. Wong-Parodi is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her B.S. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in risk perceptions and communication from the University of California, Berkeley.
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