Josh Tewksbury

Interim Executive Director; Global Hub Director, USA: Executive Team

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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.

Lakshmi Muralidharan

Finance Manager, USA

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María Fernanda Enriquez

Administrative Officer and Global Sustainability Scholars Coordinator, USA

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Veera Mitzner

Network Lead

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Veera Mitzner is the Future Earth Network Lead and the lead coordinator for Sustainability 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, nationally 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” was published by Palgrave in 2020.

Sharon Collinge

Executive Director, Earth Leadership Program

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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

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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.

Amanda Shores

AAAS STP Fellow at NSF

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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.

Hannah Moench

Network Associate

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As the Future Earth Network Associate based in the Future Earth USA Global Hub, Hannah supports the network aspects of the Future Earth Membership Portal and the Sustainability and Innovation Congress, in addition to other operations of Future Earth in Boulder, Colorado. Before joining Future Earth, Hannah split her time between seasonal work as a naturalist and deckhand on boats in Alaska and climate, infrastructure and development policy research. During this period, she worked as a Junior Researcher on the Climate Proofing Growth and Development Program at Oxford Policy Management in New Delhi, as a research intern for the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., and as a research intern at The Arctic Institute, where she continues to write a weekly news analysis piece. Hannah holds a degree in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology and certificates in Hydrology and South Asian Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder. As a student, she also studied snow hydrology as an intern at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research and researched organizational networks in the context of disaster risk reduction as a Research Assistant to a PhD student in the Global Projects and Organizations research group.

Soleil Gaylord

Intern

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Soleil rising Junior at Dartmouth College, with a double major in Government and Environmental Studies. She is an avid birder, wildflower fanatic, runner and backpacker.

Judit Ungvari

Research & Innovation Officer

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Judit Ungvari is the co-lead of the Future Earth Research and Innovation portfolio and the Research and Innovation Officer at George Mason University’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth. She came to Future Earth and Mason after 2 years at the National Science Foundation where she was a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow. She was working in the Geosciences directorate on various international and integrative activities facilitating transdisciplinary global change research. Her work encompassed various programs within the Belmont Forum, Future Earth, and the Sustainability Research and Innovation initiatives. Judit is an ecologist by training, with expertise in avian biology in tropical habitats. She studied birds in the Peruvian Amazon region combining both laboratory- and field-based research and received her Ph.D. in Zoology with a certificate and concentration in Tropical Conservation and Development at the University of Florida. Her work on Amazonian forest bird communities related to the ecological mechanisms of habitat specialization, movement and dispersal between patchy habitats, combining metapopulation theory, landscape ecology, and population genetics. She also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, addressing avian conservation issues in coffee agroecosystems in Colombia. Judit is involved in local capacity building and community outreach both in the USA and Latin America and has mentored dozens of students to complete independent research projects in Peru, Colombia and Florida. Her interests include sustainability science, science diplomacy, supporting open research efforts, and communicating science to the public.

Meagan Postema

AAAS STP Fellow at NSF

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