Chanell Fletcher was appointed to the position of Deputy Executive Officer of Environmental Justice in January 2021. Ms. Fletcher oversees CARB’s Environmental Justice and Community Air Protection Program and is responsible for developing CARB-wide environmental justice policies. She plays a key role in CARB’s programs designed to address disproportionate impacts from air pollution and climate change and associated chronic health conditions affecting Black, Latinx and other communities of color across the state.

Ms. Fletcher is the executive lead for AB 617 and its related programs. She is focused on moving away from a top-down equity model to one that centers on building relationships and trust with partners in the environmental and racial justice movement at the community level.

As part of CARB’s senior executive team, Ms. Fletcher serves as the primary internal and external contact for CARB on environmental justice, climate equity and community air protection efforts. Ms.Fletcher is also developing a training program to provide staff with the understanding and skills to more effectively partner with communities.

Prior to joining CARB, Ms. Fletcher served as Executive Director of ClimatePlan, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing policies and programs to address the relationship between land use policy and climate change to realize more sustainable and equitable development throughout California. She also served as Senior Policy Manager for the Safe Routes to Schools National Partnership. She has worked with environmental justice organizations including the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, as well as racial equity organizations including PolicyLink and Public Advocates to shape legislation and advocate for competitive grant programs that increase access and opportunity for low-income communities and communities of color.

Ms. Fletcher earned her Bachelor’s degree in History from U.C. Santa Cruz and her Master in Public Administration from San Francisco State.

Yuzhang Li is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He received his bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University. As a graduate student in Professor Yi Cui’s group, Yuzhang developed both engineering solutions and advanced characterization tools to make breakthroughs in next-generation batteries. Now, the Li Group at UCLA pursues innovations in energy and environmental technologies, which require advancements in both (1) fundamental characterization and (2) materials design. The synergy between these two broad research thrusts will bring practical applications in the short-term, while revealing new foundations to build long-term solutions. Yuzhang’s research has been highlighted by news media including Forbes, Popular Mechanics, and ABC7 Bay Area, while also being recognized with several awards including Dan Cubicciotti Award of the Electrochemical Society, Graduate Student Gold Award of the Materials Research Society.

DPhil, Anthropology, University of Oxford
MPhil, Medical Anthropology, University of Oxford
BA, Global Public Health and Anthropology, Bard College

Nicholas Shapiro is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He has worked tracking the quasi-legal resale of 120,000+ chemically contaminated housing units after Hurricane Katrina, developing air monitoring systems with communities impacted by unconventional natural gas extraction, and testing fossil fuel-free means of long distance air travel.

Current projects include:
● Studying the efficacy and microbiome impacts of a low-cost bio-phyto air remediation system.
● Supporting environmental research on toxic living conditions within carceral institutions.
● Finishing a book about toxic homes, climate change, settler-colonialism, and the desire for a radically different future, provisionally entitled “Homesick”.
● Wrapping up his participation in the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which he co-founded in 2016.

For more information on his hardware and software projects see here.

Select Publications
● Zhang, Siyang, Nicholas Shapiro, Gretchen Gehrke, Jessica Castner, Zhenlei Liu, Beverly Guo, Romesh Prasad, et al. 2019. “Smartphone App for Residential Testing of Formaldehyde (SmART-Form).” Building and Environment 148: 567–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2018.11.029.

Fredrickson, Leif, Christopher Sellers, Lindsey Dillon, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Nicholas Shapiro, Marianne Sullivan, Stephen Bocking, et al. 2018. “History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection.” American Journal of Public Health 108 (S2): S95–103. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304396.

Shapiro, Nicholas, Nasser Zakariya, and Jody Roberts. 2017. “A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating Environments to Inviting Apprehension.” Engaging STS 3: 575–602.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2017.133

● Shapiro, Nicholas. 2015. “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (3): 368–93. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.3.02.

Awards:
● 2017 Outstanding Contribution to Making and Doing, Society for the Social Studies of Science. A juried prize awarded annually to recognize STS knowledge and expertise that extend beyond the academic paper or book.
● 2017 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award, Society of American Archivists. A juried prize awarded annually for advancing archival projects with broad long-term impact. (as a founding member of EDGI)
● 2015 Cultural Horizons Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology. A juried prize awarded annually for the best article in Cultural Anthropology.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zBoratory

Paul joined the Master of Science in Business Analytics in 2017 as its first Executive Director. He brings 15 years of experience in higher education, high technology management, marketing and sales to the program. Paul experienced firsthand the power of business analytics in his work at IBM as a Client Executive and Business Analytics Software specialist. In his work with IBM, Paul supporting senior executive clients in their efforts to solve complex challenges with technology. Paul worked to bring the best of IBM hardware, software and technology services together to meet unique client demands. In the most recent 5 years, Paul served as the Executive Director of the Global Access Program, where he was responsible for the marketing, client recruiting for UCLA Anderson’s world-renowned experiential education program. Paul recruited over 250 high technology companies from 11 countries to work with UCLA Anderson Fully-employed MBA candidates to determine the viability of foreign market entry. In that effort, Paul worked with governments, NGOs and partners to identify high potential technology companies and support them through the transformative experience.

As an artist, curator, artistic director and frequent keynote speaker internationally, Kristy Edmunds has a reputation for innovation and depth in the presentation of contemporary performing arts. In collaboration with master artists, she has curated unique platforms that survey the breadth of their artistry, while placing equal emphasis on the support and commissioning of new work by some of today’s leading performance creators across disciplines.

Edmunds was the Founding Executive and Artistic Director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and the TBA Festival (Time Based Art) in Portland, Oregon. She was the Artistic Director for the Melbourne International Arts Festival from 2005 to 2008, and was the first to serve an unprecedented four-year term. Upon completion she was appointed as the Head of the School of Performing Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts/University of Melbourne, and after one year became the Deputy Dean for the College.

Concurrently, Edmunds worked as the inaugural Consulting Artistic Director for the now critically heralded Park Avenue Armory in New York (2009–2012). Curating the initial three years of programming, she established the formative identity of the PAA with commissioned work by artists such as Ann Hamilton, the final performance event of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Tom Sachs, Janet Cardiff, STREB, Ryoji Ikeda, and the Tune-In Festival with Philip Glass and many others.  

Edmunds’ robust career has included work as a visual artist, an independent filmmaker, a playwright, a director and a teacher. She holds a bachelor’s in film direction from Montana State University and a master’s in playwriting and theater direction from Western Washington University. In recognition of her contributions to the arts, Edmunds was bestowed with the honor of Chevalier (Knight) de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2016 and was the first recipient of the inaugural Berresford Prize by United States Artists (USA) in 2018.

She is married with two sons, and now calls Los Angeles home. She is the Executive and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, one of the nation’s leading presenting organizations for contemporary performing artists.

Watch Kristy Edmunds speak about what it means to be a curator in the context of the university.

Carlos was born in 1986 in Nobsa, a small town in the mountains of Colombia. He studied chemical engineering at Osaka University and received his B. Eng. degree in March 2011. He then moved to Switzerland where he obtained his M.S. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in October 2013, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in May 2016 from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His doctoral research, under the guidance of Prof. Xile Hu, was in the coupling of electrocatalysts to photoabsorbers for solar fuels production. After his Ph.D., he joined the group of Prof. Thomas Jaramillo at Stanford University where he was a postdoctoral fellow working on the engineering of catalysts for the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals.

Since November 2018, Carlos has joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering as tenure-track Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Carolyn Rodriguez (she/her) is a member of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. In 2021, she received her Master’s in American Indian Studies from UCLA. Carolyn is a PhD candidate in her fifth year at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Social Research Methodology program. She examines tribal-university relationships and how the Amah Mutsun community uses research as a tool for tribal sovereignty and cultural revitalization. Her dissertation centers on the collaboration between the Amah Mutsun Land Trust (AMLT) and CDLS. She examines how AMLT and CDLS practice educational tribal sovereignty to support Tribal efforts in revitalizing Indigenous teaching methods at the yearly AMLT Youth Summer Camp to teach Amah Mutsun youth about Indigenous land and water stewardship. Her research highlights the importance of storytelling, Indigenous science, and upholding indigenous knowledge systems. Carolyn also works with tribal youth to create a space to learn about their cultural and traditional ecological knowledge to strengthen their Native and scientific identities. She believes in supporting Amah Mutsun youth’s academic success and interest in science fields while mentoring them in social and environmental justice activism to protect the land, water, sacred sites, and all more-than-human relatives.

Research in my lab asks how collective behavior emerges from variation among system components and environmental pressures. We combine field and lab studies with computer simulations, theoretical work, image analysis, and social network theory. Furthermore, we are interested in the interplay between conservation biology and animal behavior. Examining the behavior of animals can provide important assessment tools for conservation actions and insights on preserving biodiversity. At the same time, wildlife management actions can provide unique opportunities for studying basic science questions in animal behavior. For her PhD work, Dr. Pinter-Wollman studied the effects of translocation, a wildlife management tool, on the behavior and survival of African elephants. Current work in the lab uses different species of ants, including the invasive Argentine ant, which displaces native ant species in its introduced range. We study how variation among individual Argentine ant workers influences the collective behavior of the colony. To uncover the impacts of ecological and spatial constraints on social behavior we study the collective actions of harvester ants and the social structure of a critically endangered griffon vulture population. Our work on how space influences movement patterns and resulting social interactions provides information on the potential for disease transmission and information transfer about poisonous foods to local wildlife managers. 



Education:

2008            Ph.D.  Animal Behavior. University of California, Davis

2004            M.S.  Animal Behavior. University of California, Davis            

2003            B.Sc.  Zoology. Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Peter Hendrickson, a licensed Architect with over thirty years of experience in the practice of architecture, facilities planning, design, and construction. His leadership skills, complemented by progressive experience in architectural design, project management, and staff development, has enabled Peter to work successfully both in the public and private sectors for some of the nation’s leading healthcare and educational institutions.

As the Associate Vice Chancellor – Design and Construction for UCLA Capital Programs, Peter is responsible for managing the design and construction of the approximately two billion dollar capital improvement program for the Campus. Current major activities include the seismic mitigation and infrastructure improvement for the Health Sciences and a number of ongoing research, education, housing, athletic, and auxiliary facility construction projects. Peter is also involved in the planning and development of new projects to renovate or replace the existing health sciences facilities, as well as managing other new and continuing campus academic, arts, administrative, and seismic renovation projects.

Prior to joining UCLA, Peter served as the Director, Facilities Planning, Design, and Construction at Cedars-Sinai Health System and as the Chief of Facilities Planning for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Peter spent the first ten years of his career in private practice serving the Long Beach / South Bay area of Southern California. He also served those communities as an AIA California Council Director, President of AIA Long Beach / South Bay, and as an Economic Development Commissioner for the City of Long Beach.

Peter is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and the California State University International Program.