Monika Shankar is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She graduated with a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California Los Angeles in June 2021, with a focused concentration in environmental analysis and policy. Her graduate and professional work is situated at the intersection of environmental health and justice, and urban planning, with a particular emphasis advancing research and developing policy strategies to address the presence of stationary sources of pollution in vulnerable communities. In Los Angeles, the challenge of incompatible land uses — the siting of hazardous uses of land near sensitive populations — primarily impacts the region’s low-income communities and communities of color. Monika is committed to working with these communities, alongside advocates and policy makers, to identify viable environmental and land use based strategies to mitigate harm to human health and the environment. Her approach is interdisciplinary, and rooted in community co-empowerment and multi-stakeholder engagement.

While pursuing her graduate studies, Monika continues to work with Physicians for Social Responsibility-LA (PSR-LA), which she joined in 2013. As a senior program manager, she is responsible for strategically guiding the organization’s work on air quality, land use and health, focusing especially on the implementation of the AB 617 Air Quality Project and the 500 Feet Initiative. During her tenure at PSR-LA, she served on the steering committee of ClimatePlan and the Jordan Downs Environmental Justice Coalition, and became a fellow at the Reach the Decision Makers Fellowship Program. Monika hopes to continue working within her existing network while cultivating new partnerships, with the goal of advancing solutions rooted in justice and equity that improve environmental health conditions across Los Angeles.

Lola Fatoyinbo is a forest and coastal ecologist, remote sensing scientist, and science communicator. She studies flooded forests, including mangroves and peatlands, from the ground and space, with the aim of highlighting the importance of often overlooked and understudied ecosystems. Fatoyinbo has worked on characterizing the vulnerability and response of mangroves to disturbances from land use and climate change worldwide. She has developed new remote sensing instruments and new applications of satellite data to carbon monitoring and biodiversity conservation. She is a research scientist at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Fatoyinbo was awarded the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award in Sciences and Engineering in 2012 and the 2024 Royal Geographical Society Esmond B. Martin Prize for her efforts on merging scientific priorities with advanced technology to develop innovative applications for ecosystem science. Fatoyinbo’s work has been featured on international print and broadcast media, including the BBC, PBS, CBC and The New York Times.

Dr. Kaiyu Guan is an innovator creating science- and artificial intelligence-based solutions to ensure sustainability of food security and the environment. He founded Aspiring Universe Corporation, to build on his groundbreaking academic research and bring environmental solutions to the marketplace. Aspiring Universe uses remote sensing (satellite, airborne and other data streams), process models and artificial intelligence to evaluate past, current and future farmland performance, including crop rotation, management history, yield, water use, nutrient dynamics, and carbon emission and sequestration. The combination of first-in-class science with leading-edge technology allows unprecedented accuracy at scale, and the bottom-up method can be aggregated across any global region, producing critical insights for businesses throughout the agriculture value chain. A spinout of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the company has been funded by the USDA, NSF and DOE, and counts Fortune 500 companies among its customers. Aspiring Universe is honored to be the awardee of the 2020 OCP-Larta Innovation Challenge and the Edwin Moore Family Agricultural Innovation Prize.  

In addition to his role at Aspiring Universe, Guan is the Blue Waters Associate Professor in ecohydrology and remote sensing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research group uses satellite data, computational models, fieldwork, and machine learning approaches to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource availability and ecosystem functioning. His group has keen interests in solving real-life problems, such as large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, water management and sustainability, and global food security. Guan has published 100+ papers in leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature, Global Change Biology, etc. Guan leads 15+ major federal research projects funded by NASA, DOE, NSF and USDA. 

James Kanoff is the co-founder and CEO of the Farmlink Project, a nonprofit movement on a mission to transform the food system to feed families in need while fighting climate change. Formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Farmlink has provided over 30 million meals of produce to families in need that would have otherwise been wasted preventing over 60 million pounds of carbon emissions. James is a Mayfield fellow at Stanford, majoring in symbolic systems focused on how artificial intelligence can be used to create a net-zero emissions world. Prior to Stanford, James worked for disaster response organizations in the Middle East and Central Africa and wants to bring that dedicated, mission-driven culture into solving the climate crisis. 

Farwiza Farhan is an environmental activist and one of the leading voices in the fight to protect the Leuser ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia. Farhan focuses on ground-level species protection and high-level legal advocacy. Her strength is in fostering collaboration; she built a grassroots movement that succeeded in advocating for law enforcement against companies operating illegally and launched a citizen lawsuit that empowers local communities to have meaningful involvement in policymaking. She drives change from the ground up.

Farhan is the leader of Forest, Nature & Environment Aceh (HAkA) a homegrown Acehnese NGO, which is striving to protect the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra. By empowering communities, taking legal action, and mobilizing local, national and global campaigns, Farhan and her team are helping to pave the way for true sustainable development for their people. Her impact on community-driven conservation was recognized with the 2016 Whitley Award.

The Leuser Ecosystem is the last place in the world where several of the key Sundaland mega-fauna species can still be found together: the tiger, orangutan, elephant, and rhino. Motivated by her passion to protect critically endangered species under extreme threat in this area, Farhan helped launch a legal case against a plantation concessionaire inside the Leuser Ecosystem. Eventually, the legal case ended in a victory for conservation, and the concessionaire was fined a precedent-setting USD 26 million.

Focusing on the core habitat for critically endangered mega-fauna, Farhan focuses on ground-level species protection on the one hand and high-level legal advocacy on the other. This means she deploys a new Wildlife Protection Team to destroy snares and intercept poachers, a mobile monitoring unit to track wildlife and forest crime, and a special law enforcement operation to increase prosecution rates.

Recently, she has mobilized community leaders to conduct a civil lawsuit seeking to revoke the Aceh Spatial Plan that would otherwise legitimize the building of roads, hydropower schemes, oil palm concessions, and new settlements inside the Leuser Ecosystem. If these plans are implemented, despite lack of approval by the central government, the charismatic species that make it unique will vanish and the Leuser Ecosystem would eventually be destroyed. Most conservationists, considering the challenges to be too great, do not wish to address the threats mentioned above. Farhan, however, has always understood that a holistic approach to conservation is the most viable path to success.

Etosha R. Cave is an American mechanical engineer based in Berkeley, California. She is the co-founder and chief science officer of Twelve (formerly known as Opus 12) a startup that recycles carbon dioxide. Cave grew up in Houston, where she became interested in recycling oil and gas. During high school, she joined the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and held an NSBE Scholarship. After graduating, she worked at the McMurdo Station, where she serviced HVAC systems and built the laser diode for future NASA missions. Eventually, Cave returned to her studies and started a doctoral program at Stanford University working under the supervision of Thomas F. Jaramillo. During her Ph.D., she worked on electrochemical approaches that could be used to convert carbon dioxide and water into useful plastics and household cleaners. She built a gas analysis system that could determine the composition of electrochemical reactions in real-time and earned her Ph.D. in 2015.

While at Stanford University, Cave co-founded Twelve, a start-up that uses metal catalysts to recycle carbon dioxide. Today Twelve is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has secured several academic partnerships, including funding from the National Science Foundation and I-Corps program. Cave hopes that they will be able to make diesel fuel from recycled carbon dioxide and water. Cave discussed this idea at TEDx Stanford, where she explained the recycled carbon dioxide could reduce our carbon footprint as well as supporting future space travel. Twelve’s first product will be the size of a dishwasher. Twelve was awarded the Forbes magazine Change the World Award and was selected for the Advanced Manufacturing Office Cyclotron Road program in 2016. Cave was a finalist for the Carbon Xprize in 2018.

David Diaz was born in Ensenada, Mexico to two hard-working parents, Raquel and Jose Diaz. He was raised in the communities of El Monte and South El Monte where he made some of his best friends, memories, and met his wife. Diaz’s parents went above and beyond to provide economic security for their family, working multiple jobs and eventually becoming small business owners in South El Monte, operating a successful daycare business for over a decade. Their relentless work ethic and the mentorship he received in high school from his teachers inspired him to be the first one in his family to attend college and graduate with a bachelor of arts in psychology and social behavior from Arizona State University in 2011. Shortly thereafter, he began his pursuit of a Master’s degree, receiving a Master’s of Public Health with a concentration in policy and management.

Diaz’s educational experience taught him how racism and inequitable policies created harmful environments and compromised the quality of life for his neighbors in El Monte and South El Monte, a primarily immigrant, Latino community. For nearly a decade, he worked alongside youth, community members, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and school districts to advance equity, public health, and environmental justice.

His career has been dedicated to confronting the environmental inequities in his beloved San Gabriel Valley, a sprawling region within Los Angeles County that is home to 2 million people. His work, interlacing community-based research, urban planning, advocacy, and direct programming has not only had a positive impact on our environment, but the collection of his work has set a robust foundation for the engagement of a region in the fight for clean air and open space.

Over the course of the last few ​years​, he worked on the development of:

• Advanced Energy Community; creating a net-zero community in Unincorporated Los Angeles
• Healthy Home Study; indoor air quality study examining the relationship between indoor air quality and methane exposure
• San Gabriel Valley Regional Bicycle Master Plan; 11 city-specific Active Transportation plans
• Puente Hills Landfill Park Master Plan; creation of 142 new acres of park space
• Urban Greening Toolkit; building capacity for nontraditional nonprofit agencies
• 626 Golden Streets; Multijurisdictional open street events, including the longest open streets in U.S. history.
• Los Angeles County Campaign Measures A (Parks), M (transportation, and W (Stormwater)

Currently, Diaz is an elected official serving as the Clerk of the El Monte Union High School District Board of Trustees. He is also the Chair of the Measure A Oversight Committee, Member of the Measure W Watershed Area Steering Committee, and Member of the Metro San Gabriel Valley Service Council.

Diaz currently resides in the City of El Monte, raising his one-year-old son Maceo and is happily married to Anais Medina Diaz.

Dany Sigwalt is co-executive director of the Power Shift Network. A native of Washington, D.C., Dany spent much of her career building movements and developing youth leadership while working to marry the two into one cohesive strategic reality. She cut her organizing teeth providing solidarity childcare for housing rights advocates in Washington, fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the Occupy DC movement. She joined Power Shift Network in 2016 as Operations Director and has been supporting the organization to explore better distribution of leadership energy for long-term sustainability ever since. 

Chook-Chook Hillman has spent his life immersed in Karuk tribal culture and traditions. He was born and raised near his great-grandmother’s village, near Somes Bar, CA. Chook is a community organizer, cultural practitioner and expert on Karuk ecological knowledge. He walks in two worlds, forging partnerships with NGOs, farmers, activists, other tribes and government agencies toward a sustainable future.

Spending most of his career with the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources, he has worked on diverse projects in water quality, forest management, and climate change adaption. This background helped develop a wide range of skills and expertise grounded in his tribal traditions and lifeway.

As an active community member, Chook coaches youth basketball and works in the local schools. He is the president of the Orleans Community Services District. Chook represents the Karuk tribe as a guest lecturer and as a tribal spokesperson on environmental and cultural issues at numerous universities and on the international stage.