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 RCN, please see our expression of interest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nancy Hoebelheinrich

Nancy Hoebelheinrich Nancy J. 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.

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.

Michelle Roos

Michelle Roos is the Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Network. She has over 25 years of experience in project management and environmental protection. As an EPA alum, she co-founded and co-managed the West Coast Collaborative, a public-private partnership focused on reducing diesel engine emissions. Michelle has also led national work groups to enhance environmental justice in federal permitting and served as a Special Assistant to the Regional Administrator of Region 9 in San Francisco.

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.