Josh Tewksbury

Global Hub Director, USA: Executive Team

Josh was trained as an ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and conservation biologist. He has 20+ years of active research focused on climate impacts on plants and animals; the influence of fragmentation, connectivity, invasive species and mutualism loss on populations and communities; the evolution and functional significance of chemical defense in plants; and other topics. Before joining Future Earth as the Director of the Colorado Global Hub, Josh was the founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a global research center integrated within the International Secretariat of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Geneva Switzerland. While there, Josh started the Luc Hoffmann Fellows programme and launched over a dozen research projects, including work on the Food-Energy-Water nexus in Southeast Asia, Development corridors in East Africa, global mapping of threats to biodiversity and the development of regionally-appropriate low-carbon sustainability targets for urban areas. Prior to his work at the Luc Hoffmann Institute, Josh was the Maggie and Doug Walker Endowed Professor of Natural History at the University of Washington, with appointments both in the Department of Biology and the College of the Environment, which he worked to create.

Craig Starger

Research Enabling

Craig Starger is the Research Liaison Officer at the Colorado Global Hub of Future Earth. He is based at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University. Craig Starger is a marine biologist who works to advance science for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Craig has spent over fifteen years conducting primary research on coral reef conservation biology. His research focused on questions related to corals’ adaptive response to climate change, coral recovery, and coral population connectivity with a focus on Southeast Asia. Craig recently served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow where he represented the U.S. State Department’s Office of Marine Conservation in international fisheries treaty negotiations. Just prior to joining Future Earth, Craig spent two years as a AAAS Overseas Fellow at USAID’s Regional Development Mission for Asia (RDMA) in Bangkok where he lead the design and procurement of the Oceans and Fisheries Partnership which is now the US Government’s largest investment in combatting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing overseas.

Lakshmi Muralidharan

Finance Manager, USA

María Fernanda Enriquez

Administrative Officer and Global Sustainability Scholars Coordinator, USA

Maria Fernanda supports the logistics, administration and coordination needs of Future Earth and the Global Sustainability Scholars Program. Her professional career has been focused on the environmental sector. Before joining Future Earth, she worked for five years at ISET-International, a Boulder-based international environmental organisation. Previously she worked with the United Nations Global Environment Facility-Small Grants Program in Ecuador, where she managed grants afforded to hundreds of local grassroots organisations. She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science in 2014 from the University of Connecticut, and her research focused in environmental social movements and indigenous peoples.

Laurel Milliken

Information Technology Officer

Laurel Milliken maintains the IT assets and infrastructure at the Future Earth secretariat. She is a graduate of Colorado State University with degrees in political science, business, and computer information systems. Prior to joining Future Earth, she worked in software, banking, and teaching English.

Kathy Kohm

Editor-In-Chief, Anthropocene magazine

Kathryn Kohm is an editor, designer and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in environmental media. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Anthropocene magazine, a print, online and live magazine published by Future Earth and based at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 1999-2016, she was the founding editor of Conservation magazine, from which Anthropocene evolved. She has also edited several books, including “Balancing on the Brink of Extincition,” and “Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century.” There’s an equation on a slip of paper pinned above her desk that neatly captures her editorial ambitions: Surprise + Clarity = Delight.

Jon Walton

Communications Lead

Jon Mikel Walton is the Communications Lead for Future Earth. As a passionate advocate for science-driven innovation and equitable sustainability, he strives to find common stories that drive collaboration across disciplines to help solve complex, global challenges. Prior to joining Future Earth, he worked with the World Bank to develop and deploy a wide array of strategic communications campaigns around the linkages between climate change and poverty, from executive messaging to video series and formative international events. He also spent several years as a journalist covering trends in green building practices and urban design. He holds a double B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Westmont College, as well as an M.A. from the Erasmus Mundus Masters Program in Public Policy.

Alfredo Giron

Postdoctoral Researcher, PEGASuS 2: Ocean Sustainability

Alfredo Giron is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara and for Future Earth. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he developed new methods to inform fisheries management, with focus on the Gulf of California, Mexico. In 2014, along with members of the Gulf of California Marine Program, he created dataMares, a science communication and data sharing platform. Today, dataMares is of the leading outlets in Mexico for socio-environmental science communication, with a strong presence in social media and national newspapers. As a career goal, Alfredo is interested in communicating the results of this research to the general public and to international bodies and panels, such as the United Nations Oceans Decade, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Food and Agriculture Organization. While working for Future Earth, he expects to expand his participation in these bodies and panels and help to bring scientific knowledge to action.

Judit Ungvari

AAAS STP Fellow at NSF

Erin Satterthwaite

Postdoctoral Researcher, PEGASuS 2: Ocean Sustainability

Erin Satterthwaite is a marine ecologist who works at the interface of applied marine research, policy engagement, and science communication to advance ocean conservation for sustainable development. She is interested in ocean sustainability issues related to marine biodiversity, fisheries management, social-ecological systems, citizen science, and biological oceanography. Prior to joining the Future Earth and NCEAS partnership, Erin was a California State Sea Grant Fellow with the Environmental Research Division, a research unit of the National Marine Fisheries Service's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. In this fellowship, Erin worked on projects ranging from assessing the social and ecological vulnerability of California fisheries to the use of environmental DNA to assess patterns of marine biodiversity along the California coast. Erin Satterthwaite received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in applied marine ecology and conservation in the Environmental Science and Policy Department at the Bodega Marine Laboratory, University of California, Davis. Her work there consisted of research related to spatial marine management, such as marine protected areas. She focused on understanding the movement of marine young, also known as marine larvae, to better identify habitats that are priority marine conservation areas and ensure that areas will maintain healthy populations. In addition, she used participatory research methods to assess groundfish populations, such as rockfish and lingcod, inside and outside of marine reserves to understand changes their populations. Erin is passionate about bringing together ocean sustainability research, policy engagement, and education in novel and creative ways. She has participated in COMPASS science communication trainings, engaged in state and national policy briefings, and developed trainings to provide early career scientists with practical skills to link science and policy. In addition, Erin has developed and taught numerous courses and outreach programs. She helped to develop an outreach program at Bodega Marine Laboratory, which exposes students to observation-based learning techniques, and has created a Coastal and Marine Science Pre-College Program at UC Davis. In addition, she has developed a marine science short course for journalism graduate students and an undergraduate course on the science and policy of global change. Erin is especially passionate about linking art and science as a novel form of science communication, and has displayed her own photography at science and art fusion events.

Veera Mitzner

Network Lead

As the Future Earth Network Lead, based in the Future Earth USA Global Hub, Veera is the lead coordinator for Science, Research and Innovation Congress (SRI) of which she also co-chairs the 2021 Program Committee. In addition, Veera leads the Secretariat’s global effort to support the Future Earth National and Regional Networks, mobilizing sustainability science locally and globally. Before joining Future Earth, she was an International Director and a Roman Macaya Hayes Global Science Diplomacy Fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), responsible for designing NCSE’s first international program. Previous to this work, she held a competitive fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and worked for Rare, launching the European office and expanding the European development operations of this rapidly growing global conservation non-profit focused on behavior change and sustainability. Veera holds a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, and she has considerable academic experience in science policy and diplomacy, European affairs and international relations. Through her scholarly work, she has been affiliated with Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku, and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her book “European Union Research Policy – Contested Origins” will be published by Palgrave in 2020.

Makyba Charles-Ayinde

AAAS STP Fellow at NSF

Sharon Collinge

Executive Director, Earth Leadership Program

Sharon brings diverse leadership experience and commitment to environmental sustainability to the role of Executive Director of the Earth Leadership Program. Sharon believes that good leadership doesn’t just happen, but that it takes intention, reflection, training, and practice. As a Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2004, Sharon gained pragmatic tools and joined a remarkable network of environmental scientists that accelerated her learning and practice of leadership. In the last 15 years, Sharon has engaged in collaborative leadership and in bringing “knowledge to action” in varied contexts, including the development and launch of a new professional masters’ program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, as Chief Scientist of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and in building community-university partnerships within the newly-founded Center for Sustainable Landscapes and Communities at CU-Boulder. Sharon brings her skills, energy, and expertise to the role of Executive Director, and enjoys working with others in building the next phase of the Earth Leadership Program. Sharon joined the faculty of Environmental Studies at CU-Boulder in 1998, after earning a doctorate in landscape ecology from Harvard University in 1995. Sharon’s interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching focus on human-environment interactions in urban and wild landscapes. Her research emphasizes the impacts of habitat loss, fragmentation, and restoration on the persistence of native species, communities, and ecosystems, and is particularly relevant to the interface between environmental science and policy regarding endangered species and habitat protection. Sharon was elected to serve as the Ecological Society of America’s Vice President for Public Affairs from 2011-2014 and has been a member of the Board of Trustees for The Nature Conservancy of Colorado since 2016.

Margaret Krebs

Program Director, Earth Leadership Program

As Program Director for the Earth Leadership Program, Margaret Krebs designs and facilitates the leadership program for the cohort of fellows. She also works with universities, offering train-the-trainers workshops that enable faculty and staff to design their own sustainability leadership programs for various audiences—graduate students, postdocs, early career faculty. She’s been instrumental in developing the collective leadership framework that guides the transdisciplinary training provided for researchers. Margaret’s commitment and experience designing leadership development programs led her to be selected as a participant in the 2014 Leadership for Collective Intelligences, led by Dialogos. She has melded the content of that training with her own interdisciplinary experience and is now co-designing and facilitating other related programs such as the Africa Science Leadership Program, AAAS’s Emerging Leaders in Science and Society, and the International Social Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability Programme and Stanford’s Leading Interdisciplinary Collaborations fellowship program. Prior to joining the Earth Leadership Program, Margaret managed two Stanford training grants to design new learning environments that integrated technology to support teaching and learning. Margaret’s interest in teaching and learning developed while she was an undergraduate in innovative study programs at Earlham College and evolved further when she became a teacher designing a “school without walls” in Philadelphia. This background inspired her future work in developing programs to bring research and innovation to new audiences in diverse settings – from an early childhood research center in New Haven, Connecticut to Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley.

Laura Satkowski

Science Officer

Amanda Shores

Science Officer

Amanda is a Science Officer with FutureEarth U.S. Global Hub working on Sustainability Science 2.0 and the Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress. She is trained as a urban ecosystem scientist focusing on vulnerabilities in communities arising from industrial processes and public resource access. Her expertise is in community outreach, program management, as well as geographic information systems (GIS) and R statistical software. She was the Program Manager for the Secondary Cities Initiative, an international community-based mapping program geared towards providing basic geospatial information for informed decision making. She led community outreach efforts for river restoration to bolster stakeholder buy in and promote resilient restoration design. Amanda’s PhD was completed at Colorado State University studying the groundwater contamination risk and remediation of spills arising from oil and gas extraction. She is passionate about supporting inclusion of disadvantaged individuals in STEM and sustainability activities for better representation and personal empowerment.

Natalia Davlianidze

Intern

Natalia is an Edmund S. Muskie Summer 2020 Internship Program fellow at the Future Earth U.S. Global Hub. She will work with the Swiss-based team of the Global Research Project - Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment. Originally from Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, she is pursuing her second graduate degree in Human Geography as a foreign Fulbright Scholar at Ohio University. Her ongoing research project is related to the study of the impact of population migration on the sustainable development of the mountainous communities in the Caucasus. A graduate from Tbilisi State University Department of Social and Political Sciences, with a major in Human Geography, Natalia has participated in several study abroad programs in Europe. Her past research covers various topics around sustainable urban development, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in urban planning, and human migration. In addition, Natalia has up to five years of work experience in the practical sustainable development sector in the Caucasus, working with major international donors such as USAID and the EU. This work included research, sustainable development program planning, and strategic communications in the areas of circular economy, rural development, and environmental education. Upon graduation from her Fulbright program at Ohio University, Natalia plans to apply her practical development sector experience and early career research interests to pursuing a Ph.D. She wishes to continue working in the intersection of academic research and applied work for sustainable development.

Nicholas Britton

Intern

Nicholas is a rising senior at Dartmouth College pursuing a major in Environmental Studies and a minor in Government. In addition to his studies, Nicholas is conducting research alongside Dr. Elizabeth Wilson of the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society on how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted U.S. electricity demand and regional transmission organizations. Before joining Future Earth as one of its interns, Nicholas worked as the Climate and Clean Energy Intern for David Gardiner and Associates, a clean energy consulting firm focused on issues like cogeneration, renewable thermal energy, and high-voltage electricity transmission. Before this role, he studied abroad in South Africa and Namibia and gained hands-on research experience with issues of population, land and water use, ecotourism, and resource management using social and natural science methods. At Dartmouth, Nicholas worked for the Office of Sustainability as their Energy and Utilities Intern tasked with tracking the college’s progress toward sustainability benchmarks. Nicholas has also worked as a Legal Monitoring Intern with the New Hampshire office of The Nature Conservancy conducting ecological compliance assessments of conservation sites across the state. His career interests include environmental policy and law, the renewable energy industry, and global sustainability.

Julie Jones

Intern

Julie is a rising Junior at Dartmouth, majoring in Environmental Studies and Geography. Her interests in sustainability center around global climate change science and policy and climate justice, and she has enjoyed experience in local climate governance, green building certification consulting, and social science research. Julie will be working with Future Earth’s Communications office this summer from her hometown of Kansas City.

Abigail Chamberlin

Intern

Abigail Chamberlin will be a senior this fall at Dartmouth College, where she studies Geography and Environmental Studies and does research on a coupled crop and climate model. She is excited to bring together her interests of climate change mitigation and sustainability with the goals of Future Earth this summer. Outside of her studies, Abigail enjoys spending time outside hiking, sailing and rowing where she lives in midcoast Maine.