Network Members

Meet the SEEKCommons network of STS researchers, OS practitioners, and socio-environmental researchers. If you would like to nominate someone or join this Network, please see our form to express your interest.

Browse member profiles with these alphabetically ordered shortcuts: A-H I-O P-Z.

Karl Benedict

Karl Benedict has been working in geospatial technology and archaeology since 1986. Currently, he’s the Director of Research Data Services and an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico’s College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences. Before this, he directed the Earth Data Analysis Center, combining roles in geography and library sciences. Karl has also worked with the US Forest Service and National Park Service, focusing on archaeological research and geospatial database development. Today, he helps UNM researchers manage their data effectively, ensuring that valuable research findings remain accessible and usable long after projects end.

Valerie Berseth

Valerie Berseth is an Assistant Professor of Practice and Extension Agent at Oregon State University. Valerie holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the intersections of science, technology, and society in social ecological systems, with a focus on climate adaptation, the sociocultural dimensions of knowledge production, and public perceptions of emerging technologies in conservation and resource management. She has over eight years of experience collaborating with community partners and interdisciplinary teams on large-scale genomics research projects, examining how trust, risk, and values shape decision-making in environmental governance.

Lisa Blackmore

Lisa Blackmore is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex (UK). Her work explores the relationship between humans and the environment, focusing on the intersections of politics, art, and architecture in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has taken a special interest in how authoritarian regimes affected bodies and landscapes, producing spaces of ruination and traces of violence in memory. She works with the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA), curating exhibitions and public programs for the University Gallery Art Exchange. Her projects merge practice and research, balancing writing and editing publications on the arts and ecology with curatorial and audiovisual projects.

Philip E. Bourne

Philip E. Bourne is the founding dean of the U VA School of Data Science. He was the first Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industrial Alliances at the University of California San Diego and the first Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. He strongly supports open-access literature and software and researches primarily on bioinformatics, computational biology, and open science. Through his work, he has developed several tools and resources to help researchers analyze biological data. He is the co-founder of the Galaxy Project, which is a web-based platform for bioinformatics analysis.

Morgan DiCarlo

Morgan DiCarlo is a civil engineer from Stony Brook University with a PhD from North Carolina State University in the Sociotechnical Systems Analysis Lab. She also holds a master’s in biological systems engineering from Virginia Tech. An advocate for STEM outreach and gender equity in the field, she has been a TEDx speaker and museum volunteer. In 2024, she was recognized as one of the 10 “New Faces” of Civil Engineering by ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers). She joined the EPA as a science and technology policy fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), focusing on Translational Science and Climate Change Research. She is now a full-time Physical Scientist at the EPA.

Oscar Luis Figueroa Rodriguez

With a background in rural sociology, development studies, and agricultural engineering, Oscar Figueroa R. has been working issues related to the governance of Indigenous data globally, with a special interest in Mexico and Latin America. An original signee of the CARE Principles and a member of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, he is interested in enhancing ways to assert Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in data. Originally from Texcoco, State of Mexico, he serves as an Associate Research Professor in the Rural Development Studies Program at the Colegio de Posgraduados (COLPOS, México), working from a complex systems perspective to study the commons, participatory planning, and regional development.

Scott Frickel

Scott Frickel is a professor at Brown University. As a socio-environmental researcher, Scott explores the complex dynamics between science, society, and the environment. His research looks to answer questions about equity and environmental justice, informing decisions about environmental and public health. His current work develops computational methods and tools to generate historically geo-referenced databases on historical hazard land uses, connecting land uses to places of exposure for vulnerable populations.

Kyle Harp-Rushing

Kyle Harp-Rushing (He/Him) is a cultural anthropologist specializing in science and medicine’s histories and cultures. He focuses on the co-productive relationships between emergent digital communication infrastructures and the techno-politics of “replicability crises” in the context of multiple Open Science movements. His ethnographic fieldwork with both nonprofit and for-profit Open Science advocates, developers, and networks (mainly in the US), as well as with experimental lab scientists, engaged the contingent technocultural contexts of experimental encounters to historicize and shed light on the participatory politics, ideologies, imaginaries, anxieties and (un)intended consequences of Open Science. He has experience with several interdisciplinary research teams, specially working to grow the “small data” of ethnographic conversations and observations into compelling stories and insights.

Liz Henry

Liz Henry (they/them) heads the nonprofit organization Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, which aims to make DIY assistive technology designs and information available under open licenses. Liz is a hacker and makerspace enthusiast and founder, most closely involved with Noisebridge and Double Union in San Francisco. Liz also works in open source software at Mozilla as a technical program & release manager for Firefox and its developer toolchain. Additionally, Liz is a grantmaker and advisor; they are on the advisory board for San Francisco’s new Disability Cultural Center building, and work as grant program manager for progressive tech funds, including Disability Inclusion Fund x Tech.

Nancy Hoebelheinrich

Nancy Hoebelheinrich is an independent scholar, information analyst, consultant and educator who leads her own small business, Knowledge Motifs LLC from San Mateo, California. As an information science researcher and educator focused on data stewardship, organization, retrieval, management and skills training, and digital libraries, Nancy has been involved in a number of initiatives on these topics for academic institutions such as Stanford University, the University of California Office of the President, the University of California San Diego (UCSD), non-governmental organizations such as the San Francisco Estuary Institute, the Library of Congress, and community organizations including GO FAIR US, EarthCube, the Research Data Alliance, and Earth Science Information Partners. Her focus has been upon data description (metadata), and development of learning resources for researchers and data specialists.

Erin Kansa

Eric currently oversees the development of Open Context, an open-access data publishing service enhancing scholarship through the Open Web technologies at Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI), a non-profit technology company that preserves and shares world heritage on the Web. He explores Web architecture and service design in his work, particularly interested in the social and professional environments within the digital humanities. Eric has done research examining policy issues connected to intellectual property, with a special interest in text-mining and cultural property concerns. Eric has taught at the Berkeley School of Information’s Clinic program and has contributed to various initiatives in Open Science, Open Government, and cyberinfrastructure.

Abby J. Kinchy

Abby J. Kinchy is a researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). With a strong focus on socio-environmental research, Abby investigates environmental issues’ social and political dimensions. Her current projects focus on soil contamination through a community science approach. With a focus on heavy metal contamination in urban soil, she works with a multidisciplinary team to develop and deploy a Community Soil Study Toolkit in front-line communities exposed to soil contamination. By doing so, they provide a case study of how collaborative citizen science addresses complex socio-environmental problems.

Aya H. Kimura

Aya H. Kimura is a researcher at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. Committed to understanding the intersections of technoscience, sustainability, and power relations in society, Aya examines socio-environmental challenges’ from an approach entangling Science and Technology Studies, citizen science, and feminist political ecology. Her ongoing work develops around the relationship between colonialism, militarism, and environmental contamination.

Christine Kirkpatrick

Christine Kirkpatrick leads the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s (SDSC) Research Data Services division. There, she is in charge of large-scale infrastructure, networking, and services for research projects of regional and national scope. She also heads the GO FAIR US initiative, serves as Secretary General of CODATA, and is a Principal Investigator for the EarthCube Office, the West Big Data Innovation Hub, the U.S. National Committee for CODATA for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the FAIR Digital Object Forum. Christine’s work connects open access, data management, and digital libraries.

Kirk Jalbert

Kirk Jalbert is a scholar affiliated with Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He does research exploring public engagements with environmental science and governance in the context of energy justice movements and how the interplay of data mobilizations, information technologies, and community-driven scientific research efforts shapes them. Kirk intersects critical making, art, and Science and Technology Studies in his work.

Madhuri Karak

Madhuri Karak (she/her) is an independent multimedia researcher working at the intersections of climate, technology, and culture. With regional expertise in South and Southeast Asia, she has supported earth defenders, small-scale fishers and farmers, environmental and climate organizers, and digital rights practitioners to secure and manage the commons for collective wellbeing. Spanning landscape research, podcasts, narrative longform, and strategic community engagement, her work explores the growing overlap between climate justice and digital rights issues. Her current project ‘Beyond Carbon: Using Multi-sensory Datasets for Climate Action’ is an art and research initiative designed to counter carbon-centered forest data infrastructures with visual experiments that unite community-owned knowledges of landscapes with Lidar data. Madhuri was a Mellon - American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow (2019-2021) and has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Ciera Martinez

Ciera Martinez is a Senior Program Manager with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE) who focuses on data intensive research projects that aim to understand how life on this planet evolves in reaction to the environment and climate. A long-time open science advocate, Ciera has been involved with and continues to be interested in working on training for open data, education, publishing, and software, including developing community standards for data management practices.

Daniel Mietchen

Daniel Mietchen is an open science advocate and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is also a senior researcher at the FIZ Karlsruhe and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. Daniel is too a former senior researcher at the Data Science Institute at the University of Virginia. His research interests include open science, data science, and ecosystem research. He is a strong advocate for making scientific research more open and accessible.

Marko Monteiro

Marko Monteiro is a professor at the University Estadual Campinas, Brazil. Marko works on developing new understandings of science and technology’s social, political, and ethical aspects. He has worked on the visibilities and materialities of territory enabled by remote sensing technology and their relation to policy in Brazil. He is currently part of the Amazon FACE project, a field experiment of unprecedented scope to understand the future of the Amazon Rainforest.

Gwen Ottinger

Gwen Ottinger is a research scholar at Drexel University. With an interest in environmental justice, expertise and authority, Gwen focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and society. She explores the role of emerging technologies’ social and environmental implications, focusing on how communities engage with and shape scientific knowledge and developing opportunities to integrate research findings into practice. Her current work focuses on petrochemical pollution in collaboration with front-line community residents.

Mark Parsons

Mark Parsons is a Research Scientist and geographer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has been involved in several initiatives to make scientific research more open and accessible and has led significant data stewardship efforts for over 25 years. Mark has helped coordinate stewardship of a broad range of data, from satellite remote sensing to Indigenous knowledge of Arctic change.

Karl Benedict

Kathy Pope

Kathy Pope serves as the Environmental Protection Network’s Development Director and Community Outreach Manager. At EPN, Kathy manages EPN’s development work and the pro bono capacity-building technical assistance program, with more than 550 EPA alumni from all over the United States that volunteer their time to protect the integrity of EPA, human health, and the environment.

Bárbara Rocha Cardeli

Bárbara Rocha Cardeli is a PhD researcher working in entanglements of ecology, technology, and society. She holds a degree in Biological Sciences from the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (PUC-Campinas) and a master’s in Ecology and Biodiversity from Sao Paulo State University (UNESP). Currently, as a PhD student in Ecology at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), her project explores the impacts of climate change on functional diversity and ecosystem services in the Brazilian Amazon.

Saguna Shankar

Seguna Shankar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University at Buffalo, specializing in community data care, information practice, information policy, and interdependence. With a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia (2023) and a MLIS (2016) from the same institution, Saguna combines extensive academic training with a deep commitment to practical applications in information science. Recognized for scholarly excellence, she has received the CAIS (Canadian Association for Information Science), the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition offered by ALISE (Association for Library and Information Science Education), and the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Daniela Soleri

Daniela Soleri serves as a lecturer and researcher at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on understanding local knowledge, practices, and outcomes in the management and use of crop plant diversity, particularly concerning climate change and environmental and social changes. She emphasizes the importance of equitable partnerships between scientists and practitioners, rooted in respect and mutual understanding, to enhance agricultural systems and address global challenges. Daniela has worked with diverse communities and published books on food gardening and gardens in changing climates and societies. She is researching seed libraries and community seed management to support grassroots seed sharing through participatory or community science initiatives.

Vincenzo Tozzi

Vincenzo Tozzi comes from Sicily, where he still has his “first” family and collaborates with the BOCS cultural space. He is from Campania, the land of witches, where he dreams of an organic farm T3RRA. He became Brazilian 20 years ago, dreaming and fighting with the Mocambos Network. He is a network artisan at the Casa de Cultura Tainã and a offspring of the Mercado Sul, where he matured as an angoleiro (a practitioner of Capoeira in the Angola variant style). He is a computer scientist, graduated from the Università degli Studi di Firenze, where he participated in the social and student movement Studenti di Sinistra, the Comitato Kurdistan, and the PoliOpposti newspaper. In 2005, he worked in the Federal Government, first at GESAC and then at the Presidency of the Republic. Since 2007, he has coordinated the Digital Research and Development Group of the Mocambos Network. He is one of the creators of the Free Software Baobáxia. He works with people in Popular Culture and Agroecology and currently lives in Guapimirim, Rio de Janeiro with his partner and two wonderful daughters.