Network Members

Meet the U.S. NSF 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.

Liz Barry

Elizabeth Barry is the Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, an initiative she helped found to promote open-source tools for democratic participation. She collaborates with facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, and governments to implement “listening at scale” initiatives. Elizabeth gained her facilitation experience by engaging with thousands of people across the U.S. through her “Talk To Me” sidewalk campaign. She co-founded TreeKIT, helping map New York City’s trees, and founded the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science to support open research and environmental monitoring. She was elected to the Community Council of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware, a global movement to advance open science tools. Trained as a landscape architect and urban designer, Elizabeth applies her expertise to enhance human-environment-technology relationships, with a focus on community organizing, environmental justice, and democratic engagement. Her work emphasizes collective self-determination and innovative methods for civic engagement.

Jose Ramon Becerra Vera

Jose (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, working in the Farmer Learning, Agriculture, Culture, Humanities, Social science laboratory. While pursuing his doctoral degree, Jose has held positions working on pollution issues and environmental justice across non-profits and government, including as a Yale University Environmental Fellow, with Chicago’s non-profit organization Elevate, and as a University of New Hampshire Sustainability Fellow with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His dissertation uses qualitative ethnographic and quantitative exposure science instruments to examine the drivers of toxicity in ecological landscapes and uneven contamination exposure. Through his work across the social and environmental sciences, Jose aims to democratize science, contribute to community health, and advocate for environmental justice.

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.

Louise Bezuidenhout

Louise Bezuidenhout is a social science researcher who specializes on issues relating to Open Science, data sharing and access. Her research is broadly oriented around themes such as justice and access, inclusion and marginalization and equity. Much of her work to date has concentrated on understanding diverse voices and values within the Open Science movement, in particular identifying ways to improve the representation and inclusion of low/middle-income country researchers into the Open Science landscape. This work has involved embedded ethnographies, interviews and surveys in a number of countries in Africa, Europe and North America. With an international trajectory, Dr Bezuidenhout currently works at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at the University of Leiden as a senior researcher focusing on Open Science monitoring and practice.

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.

Jocelyn Cheé-Santiago

Jocelyn belongs to the Binnizá people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, and is a speaker of the Diidxazá language. Her academic background is rooted in Genomic Sciences and Philosophy of Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has worked on linguistic human rights, access to health, analysis of epistemic injuctices and gender bias in medical practice, as well as the historic analysis of population genetics in Mexico. Jocelyn joined the Tsosie Lab in Fall 2024 as a Biology and Society PhD student under the mentorship of Dr. Krystal Tsosie and Dr. Breckett Sterner. She is interested in research on the governance of Indigenous Peoples’ genomic data, the laws and international treaties on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and how these policies intersect with scientific practice.

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.

MV Eitzel

MV Eitzel is a researcher at the University of California, Davis, focusing on community-engaged research that fosters the well-being of people and ecosystems, particularly those affected by past injustices. Currently affiliated with the Center for Community and Citizen Science and the Feminist Research Institute, MV also serves as the Staff Scientist for the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force at UC Berkeley. With a scholarship that blends data science, participatory action research, and Science and Technology Studies, MV employs a range of ecoinformatic tools to analyze complex social-ecological systems, prioritizing collaborative modeling efforts and integrating diverse knowledge forms for equitable outcomes. MV works collaboratively with communities to build data representations and models, supporting analysis and synthesis of community-held data as appropriate.

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.

WarīŇkwī Flores

WarīŇkwī Flores (sibling/hir) is a PhD student in Natural Resources specializing in Indigenous Komplexity Systems Theory and BioKulture Research Design. Hir research focuses on agroecology systems metabolism, Indigenous data sovereignty and governance (‘Data Kinship’), and digital stewardship within environmental DNA (‘dimension-verse’ eDNA). WarīŇkwī advocates for biocultural intellectual property rights, the empowerment of Indigenous Peoples, and the integration of social ecology value systems, including Indigenous economic frameworks, to promote resilient, culturally-informed environmental solutions.

Alicia Gibb

Alicia Gibb is an advocate for open hardware, researcher, and a hardware hacker. Alicia has worked within the open source hardware community since 2008. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), a non-profit organization to educate the benefits of building and using open source hardware. Alicia founded the Association after founding and chairing the Open Hardware Summit, a conference where the open source hardware community discusses business, manufacturing, legal implications, and all things open source hardware.

Ben Goering

Ben Goering is a decentralized and federated web engineer who previously worked for Protocol Labs. Ben brings his experience with “dweb” to the work we are doing to build common infrastructures and protocols for collaborative socio-environmental research. He has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area in various community initiatives, including most notably ActivityPub.

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.

Pen-Yuan Hsing

Pen-Yuan Hsing (he/they) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Much of Pen’s work is “research on research,” applying academic rigor to solving systemic problems in the research community. Pen is an advocate for open research, having taken on an advisory role for the NASA Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission, worked with UNESCO on developing and implementing their Recommendation on Open Science, and has served as a member of The Turing Way. Pen has been active in open source tech communities for more than a decade. Currently, he is a board member of the Open Science Hardware Foundation, which advocates for open source hardware in open science policies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ryan McGranaghan

Ryan McGranaghan is a Data Scientist and Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, he focuses on machine learning and instrument autonomy to enhance Earth and Space Sciences. As a core team member of the NASA Transformation to Open Science (TOPS) initiative, he promotes accessibility and inclusivity in scientific research. With a background as Principal Data Scientist at Orion Space Solutions, Ryan combines traditional space physics with innovative data science methods. He has received prestigious fellowships, including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the NASA Jack Eddy Fellowship. Ryan is also the creator and host of The Origins Podcast, fostering interdisciplinary connections for scientific growth.

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.

Alex Pazaitis

Alex Pazaitis is researcher at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology and Core Member of P2P Lab. He is also a visiting researcher at the Post-Growth Innovation Lab, University of Vigo and a visiting lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since 2023 Alex is leading ‘Life after growth’ a research & practice project exploring post-growth pathways of collective action and organising. Alex’s research is focusing on value perceptions from a commons perspective and implications for technology and organisational practices. He has extensive experience from research and innovation projects and project management, and has worked as a consultant for private and public organisations. His research interests include digital commons; theory of value; innovation policy; cooperativism; and distributed ledger technologies.

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.

Alejandro Ponce de León

Alejandro Ponce de León is an educator at UC Berkeley, Education dept. He is a researcher and editor, whose work and practice intersect the environmental humanities, technoscience studies, and citizen science education. He is also the founding editor of “Environmental Humanities.”

Alison Parker

Alison Parker, PhD, specializes in promoting innovative approaches to science and technology, including citizen science and open hardware. She served as Senior Policy Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. At the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, she was a Senior Program Associate at the Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP). Alison has served on the Board of Directors and as Chair of the Citizen Science Association, and she was a member of the Editorial Board for Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. Previously, she led initiatives at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to incorporate crowdsourcing and citizen science into research and decision-making. Alison earned her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, focusing on native pollinators and citizen science.

Monica Ramize-Andreotta

Dr. Monica Ramirez-Andreotta is an assistant professor of Soil, Water, and Environmental Science (SWES) at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. With a multidisciplinary background that includes Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Studio Art, and Public Administration, and a Ph.D. in SWES, she specializes in citizen science and environmental justice. Her work focuses on developing low-cost monitoring tools and risk communication strategies to enhance public participation and understanding of environmental health, notably engaging underserved communities through projects like Gardenroots, a co-created citizen science project. Recognized with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award, she is dedicated to advancing equitable environmental health research and community engagement.

Erin Robinson

Erin (she/her) is a researcher specializing in information science and environmental science, focusing on environmental information infrastructures and place-based collaboratories. Her early work involved studying long-range transport of smoke and dust, which required integrating data from various sources in incompatible formats, highlighting the social and behavioral challenges of data reuse. This experience inspired her to work with the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) for ten years, serving as Information and Virtual Community Director and later as Executive Director. At ESIP, she developed programs and organized conferences to foster community and develop shared solutions for data sharing issues. In 2020, she joined Metadata Game Changers, a consultancy addressing these challenges. Her recent work includes the FAIR Island project, which became the foundation for her dissertation in Information Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She focuses on improving collaborative data sharing at environmental field stations through infrastructural interventions, aiming to enhance data reuse and cooperation.

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.

Stephanie Russo Carroll

Stephanie Russo Carroll is Ahtna, a citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah in Alaska, and of Sicilian-descent. Based at the University of Arizona (UA), she is Associate Professor, Community, Environment and Policy Department at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health (MEZCOPH) and American Indian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Program, Associate Research Professor, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and its Native Nations Institute (NNI), and Director, Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance.

Stephanie’s research explores the links between Indigenous governance, data, the environment, and community wellness. Her interdisciplinary lab group,the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance Research, develops research, policy, and practice innovations for Indigenous data sovereignty. Indigenous data sovereignty draws on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that reaffirms the rights of Indigenous nations to control data about their peoples, lands, and resources.

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.

Tiffany Tang

Tiffany (she/her) is currently an Environmental Engineering doctoral student at Northeastern University. She obtained her MS and BS in Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, focusing on factors affecting removal of emerging contaminants 1,4-dioxane and PFAS from drinking water. At Northeastern University, she’s excited to conduct environmental engineering research from an environmental justice standpoint through investigating the validity of private well water location methods and exploring the way these methods interplay with demographics, social equity, policy formation, and water quality. She aims to develop her skills as a community-focused researcher with a multifaceted understanding of drinking water issues ranging from treatment to policy.

Mai Ishikawa Sutton

Mai Ishikawa Sutton is co-founder and editor of COMPOST, an online magazine about the digital commons, and project manager of Distributed.Press. Mai is also a contributor to Hypha Worker Co-operative and Digital Commons Fellow with Commons Network. Mai is interested in how digital commoning is made possible through cooperative ownership, decentralized technologies, and governance structures that allow strong patterns of communication and constructive feedback loops.

Shah Selbe

Shah Selbe is a member of the Open Source Hardware Association. He is an engineer and conservation technologist working on open source hardware instrumentation for environmental studies. His science platform is called FieldKit (fieldkit.org) and is aimed at helping researchers, students, and explorers share live environmental and field data on an interactive site. He is building an extensive library of open source sensor systems that can be used in science and conservation research.

Diego Ellis Soto

Diego Ellis Soto is research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, working on socio-environmental problems from an ecological perspective. His research sits at the intersection of spatial ecology, global change biology, conservation, and environmental data science. He develops ecological forecasting and conservation prioritization methods, integrating biodiversity data with socio-economic variables.

Yunus Doğan Telliel

Yunus Doğan Telliel is a cultural anthropologist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. With a strong interest in transdisciplinary research inquiries, his work focuses on the design of human-computer interactions. He traces alternative and critical design imaginaries in AI and robotics research, and he is an advocate of public interest robotics in environmental science and governance. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he has been collaborating with engineering faculty and graduate students on his educational experiments that seek to incorporate qualitative research methods and community-based science into STEM education.

Kathe Todd Brown

Kathe is a computational biogeochemist specializing in the study of soil respiration through the integration of mathematics, computer modeling, and global data. Their work focuses on soils as a major source of natural carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas influencing climate change. Kathe develops and refines models with community participation to predict how soil emissions may increase with global warming, with the goal of improving the ability to forecast and mitigate climate impacts.

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.

Sebastián Ureta

Sebastián Ureta is Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, with a joint appointment between College UC and the Institute for Sustainable Development. His main area of interest is the analysis of policies, practices, and conflicts associated with the governance of environmental degradation and restoration in Chile. He is currently developing research projects on productive transitions in marine environments and on the regulation of soil contamination. In addition to multiple articles in leading journals, he has published the books Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society (MIT Press, 2015), Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral extraction as ecological practice (University of California Press, 2022), and Experimentos Políticos: Repensando la implementación de políticas públicas (Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2023).

Emilio Velis

Emilio Velis is the Executive Director of the Appropedia Foundation, an organization that promotes access to knowledge on sustainability and poverty reduction, applying his experience in community development, open hardware and open licensing. Emilio advocates for the responsible use of new technologies to solve global issues that range from community violence to climate change and contributes to various organizations and networks in these subjects. He has mentored, done research and taught at the undergraduate and masters level regarding these subjects. His research includes topics related to community empowerment, collaborative methodologies for open-source documentation, and the importance of open knowledge for science and social impact.

Jeff Ward

Jeff Ward is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Animikii, an Indigenous technology company committed to values that foster mutual understanding and equity. The company is responsible for developing Niiwin, an Indigenous Sovereignty platform that facilitates the creation of learning communities and complex, data-driven storytelling applications. Niiwin also serves as the foundation for many custom and culturally safer software solutions, developed in collaboration with partners and users. Jeff founded Animikii in 2003 and has orchestrated and managed its growth ever since. Everything Jeff does in business is geared towards uplifting his family, communities, and Indigenous Peoples. He is Ojibwe and Métis, originally from Manitoba, and now lives and works in Victoria, BC, on Lekwungen territory. Jeff is a web designer, software developer, author, and speaker. He also serves as a board member for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN).

Kate Wing

Kate Wing is an expert in complex systems and ocean work, focused on designing solutions for wicked problems that involve multiple perspectives. Founder and Executive Director of Intertidal Agency, she has led strategy and design projects related to the environment, including issues concerning forests, fish, birds, bugs, and surrounding communities. There, she focused on building foundations for social change organizations that develop strategies at the intersection of technology, conservation, and policy, working with partners such as the World Economic Forum, Walton Family Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy.

Brandon Whitehead

Brandon Whitehead is an environmental data scientist at Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he explores ways to describe commonalities between different worldviews within science, including Māori perspectives. His passion for science was sparked in middle school outside Minneapolis. As a student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, he developed a love for Earth science and computing, also recognizing the challenge of inconsistent data reporting in research, such as water table studies. After working in California for private companies, Whitehead moved to New Zealand to focus on making data more accessible and meaningful for communities.

Sebastian Zárate

Sebastián (he/him) holds a PhD in Forestry and Environmental Resources from North Carolina State University. He has over ten years of experience in projects focused on public policy analysis, social stratification and ethnicity, innovation, agrobiodiversity, data governance, and Indigenous communities. He has served as a consultant for the IDB CRISPR project in Latin America and the Caribbean, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He is currently a consultant for the International Potato Center (CIP). He has published on public policy, responsible innovation, agrobiodiversity, and data governance and regulatory regimes in Latin America. He was a Fellow at the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University (2020–2022) and a member of the CompCoRe network (2020–2021), an initiative led by Harvard University and Cornell University to assess countries’ responses to COVID-19.