Melissa is the SAR Communication Director for the 2023-2024 year.

Maya Ofek is a research analyst whose work focuses on the intersection of climate and energy policy and equity.

Before joining the CCSC team at UCLA, Maya has worked as a researcher at the Lewis Center for Regional Studies at UCLA and the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA. She previously interned at the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy and worked on consulting projects for the California Community Foundation, the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. 

She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at UC Berkeley and her Master’s in Public Policy at UCLA. 

Hannah is currently a Master of Urban and Regional Planning graduate student with an interest in achieving climate justice through nature-based, community-driven, creative solutions. Having graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering with an emphasis on stormwater management, she recognizes the necessity of approaching our modern challenges through interdisciplinary, collaborative action.

Hannah grew up in Sonoma, surrounded by vineyards and cows, and spent holidays on her grandparent’s produce farm in Sacramento. Raised by a family of farmers in an agricultural town, she feels passionate about protecting populations vulnerable to climate change, and about natural resource stewardship. Hannah aspires to balance and integrate climate adaptation efforts between highly urban areas and rural regions, according to their variegated challenges.

Chris Jadallah is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in Education at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. His research agenda examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of science and environmental education, with a specific focus on community-based and place-based learning environments. He works across a variety of socioecological contexts – from diversified farming systems to river restoration efforts – where he interrogates how issues of power, place, and participation structure and mediate opportunities for learning in service of socioecological transformation. Specifically, he leverages critical and sociocultural perspectives on learning and qualitative methods in his work with the goals of:

1. Creating and deepening opportunities for individuals and communities to contribute their knowledge, practices, and perspectives toward social and environmental justice.

2. Disrupting conventional hierarchies in environmental decision-making that privilege dominant forms of expertise over the local knowledge and practices found distributed within communities.

3. Making visible the relationships between broader systems of power and moment-to-moment processes of interaction and learning.

Central to Jadallah’s research is a commitment to community-engaged scholarship. This entails collaborating with community partners to simultaneously co-design, implement, and study initiatives that build capacity for more just and sustainable futures.

I received my BS in Public Health with a minor in agriculture from Rutgers University and my MS in Toxicology from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Following the completion of my masters, I moved to California and currently hold a position for the US Environmental Protection Agency as a technical lead in wildfire and air toxics research. My professional and academic interests lie in environmental pollutant fate and transport, as well as developmental toxicity and teratology, and global health. At UCLA, I am working with Dr. Sanjay Mohanty to study the fate and transport of PFAS in the environment.

Delaney Buskard is a second-year doctoral student in Environmental Science & Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studying at the Institute of the Environment & Sustainability. Her research focuses on corporate sustainability, strategy, and climate transition planning. She currently conducts research at the UCLA Anderson Center for Impact and serves as a Sustainability Fellow at Edison International.

Delaney’s passion for environmental science was sparked in high school by an inspiring AP Environmental Science teacher who introduced her to the realities of global climate change and the possibilities for positive impact through the energy transition. Her academic and professional work is driven by the belief that STEM should extend beyond the lab to reflect the complexity of the real world—where diversity and inclusion are essential for credible and impactful research.

Outside of her studies, Delaney enjoys baking, traveling, and watching tennis.

Mariana is a Ph.D. Student at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is interested in the relationship between inequality, vulnerable communities, and the climate change and biodiversity loss crisis. She is interested in tackling questions on the challenges and opportunities faced by countries in the tropics, especially in South America, to tackle environmental injustice.

Before joining IoES, she earned a bachelor’s in Biology at Los Andes University (Colombia), a master’s in Urban Planning with an environmental emphasis at EAFIT University (Colombia), and an MPA in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University (NYC). She has worked on several urban, environmental, and social policy projects with an interdisciplinary focus. She has experience in projects on deforestation in Latin America and the urgency to attack this problem.