Born and raised in Madagascar, Tiana joined Fanamby — a nonprofit working on sustainable management of harmonious protected areas — in 2009. Her goal with the team is to establish cooperatives-driven conservation within harmonious protected areas. As everyone benefits from watersheds, the aim is to ensure supply chains are not only traceable but also sustainable for all.

With a background in biochemistry, Tiana has spent the past 20 years designing and implementing strategies that combine conservation, social enterprise and land-use planning. Under her leadership, Fanamby co-manages more than one million hectares of protected areas across Madagascar and supports the creation of two social enterprises. The organization has built value chains in sectors such as vanilla and spices, fishery and pro-conservation agroecology that directly benefit local producers while reducing pressure on ecosystems.

In 2021, she joined the fellowship of the Women for the Environment in Africa movement, which supports transformative leadership for women conservation leaders across the continent. She was also recognized as one of the 100 Young African Leaders in Environment, and in 2025, she completed the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for Impact Program (MELP), supported by Maliasili — and the Henry Fellowship Program of the Mulago Foundation — strengthening her team’s ability to track outcomes and scale impact.

Her approach is rooted in practical solutions and long-term partnerships — with communities, government and the private sector. She believes in models that are replicable, measurable and adaptable to different contexts, particularly in the Global South.

Viji Thomas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sinkco Labs, a climate biotech company delivering permanent carbon removal through biomass injection into marine sediments. He leads the company’s strategic direction, regulatory engagement and commercial partnerships. With a background in bioprocess engineering and nearly a decade in sustainability and innovation consulting, Viji brings a multidisciplinary approach to scaling frontier climate solutions.

Viji has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Environment and Climate and is a BMW Responsible Leader, reflecting his global leadership in climate entrepreneurship. Under his direction, Sinkco Labs has secured partnerships with Shopify, Breakthrough Energy and global carbon registries, positioning the company at the forefront of durable, nature-aligned carbon removal.

Prior to founding Sinkco Labs, Viji supported clean tech commercialization and decarbonization strategies across various sectors. His leadership reflects a commitment to operationalizing science, building just climate solutions and advancing carbon removal at meaningful scale.

Seema Lokhandwala is an engineer-turned-conservation scientist with over a decade of experience in integrating technology, behavioral ecology and community engagement to address human-elephant conflict in India. Her work exemplifies how context-driven, frugal innovations from the Global South can build resilience and enable both people and elephants to thrive amid climate and conservation challenges.

As the Founder and Principal Investigator of the Elephant Acoustics Project, Seema has led the development and deployment of acoustic detection and deterrence systems that help local communities anticipate and safely respond to elephant movements, thus demonstrating how accessible technology can bridge the gap, and not just create barriers, between people and wildlife. She is adept in signal-processing, bioacoustics and linguistics, creating India’s first database of Asian elephant vocalizations and designing field-ready bioacoustic monitoring tools. Seema is equally at home in the field as in the lab, making community engagement and participation a cornerstone of her work in order to devise solutions that are practical, efficient and locally relevant.

Seema has secured the support of leading conservation funders through her targeted and effective advocacy for humane alternatives to elephant translocation and rapid implementation of deterrence systems. She has also mentored early-career scientists and has spoken on popular platforms to spread awareness about conflict mitigation. She has published her research findings in peer-reviewed journals, and her work has been featured in Nature, Mongabay, CNN’s Call to Earth and the Zoo series by Dublin Zoo, among others.

Priya Donti is an Assistant Professor and the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Professor at MIT EECS and LIDS. Her research focuses on machine learning for forecasting, optimization and control in high-renewables power grids. Priya is also the Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning.

Priya received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics with an emphasis in Environmental Analysis from Harvey Mudd College. She was recognized as part of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” and Vox’s 2023 “Future Perfect 50” and is a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and best paper awards at the International Conference on Machine Learning (honorable mention), ACM e-Energy (runner-up), the Power and Energy Conference at Illinois, the Duke Energy Data Analytics Symposium and the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Social Good.

Heidi Cullen is the Director of Climate Initiatives at Schmidt Sciences, where she supports interdisciplinary climate research and modeling efforts to bend the carbon curve and secure a sustainable future.

Prior to joining Schmidt Sciences, Heidi served as Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. From 2008-2018, she was the Chief Scientist for Climate Central—a non-profit science communication organization she helped found. Heidi was The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and was part of the team that launched Forecast Earth, an award-winning weekly climate and sustainability program. She worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research studying the dynamics of drought. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. Heidi is the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins in 2010.

In 2017, Heidi received the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award for her work as a science communicator. She received the 2019 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education for outstanding contributions to the advancement of defending the teaching of climate science.

Heidi holds a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University.

Joye Williams and Maya Smith are the Co-founding Executive Directors of the Boston Harbor Women of Color Coalition (BHWOCC), a groundbreaking initiative uplifting the expertise, leadership, healing and environmental stewardship of women of color across Boston’s waterfront communities.

Joye, a Dorchester native and also serves as Director of Operations at Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, brings over a decade of nonprofit leadership in organizational strategy, budgeting and environmental advocacy. She is also the founder of Joyefully Natural, a wellness brand rooted in ancestral healing and sustainability. Her community impact extends through board service with the Neponset River Watershed Association, the Dorchester Food Co-op and stewardship of urban gardens with The Trustees.

Maya, a passionate community-builder and Director of Partnerships & Program Development at Save the Harbor, oversees a $300,000 grant program advancing equitable waterfront access. She designs and scales programs that prioritize black, indigenous, immigrant, queer, disabled and working-class communities centering joy, equitable access and cultural relevance. Her work reflects years of organizing with artists, youth and elders across the city to reclaim nature as a space of belonging.

Together, Joye and Maya have grown BHWOCC into a 200+ member coalition that activates public community spaces through monthly meet-ups, professional development events, strategic planning sessions and collaborations that bridge environmental advocacy, culture and healing. Their leadership is rooted in love for their community, for nature and for collective advancement. With fierce clarity and community wisdom, they are transforming not only Boston Harbor but blue and green spaces across the region into a model of environmental justice led by those most impacted.

Mason Grimshaw (Sicangu Lakota) channels cutting-edge AI into practical tools that serve the tribal priorities of safeguarding ecosystems, revitalizing language and strengthening local economies. As Vice President of IndigiGenius, he guides programs that put large-language-model and computer-vision projects directly in the hands of native youth and communities, turning classrooms into innovation centers. His work has reached global audiences through TEDx Boston, Forbes, The New York Times and NBC.

A believer in using responsible AI for good, Mason tailors geospatial foundation models to guide our understanding of the Earth. Whether it’s a project for the World Wildlife Fund or the Sicangu Climate Center, Mason is applying geospatial foundation models to improve decision-making and understanding of Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth.

He also founded — and currently instructs — the Lakota AI Code Camp, where 53 Indigenous high-school students have already created apps that understand Lakota phrases, recognize traditional plants and model local weather conditions. A frequent speaker on data-sovereignty and tribal use of AI, Mason demonstrates how communities often excluded from high-tech arenas can define and deploy AI for every challenge they deem important.

Jonathan Webb is a visionary American entrepreneur with a proven track record of developing large-scale sustainable infrastructure who is focused on addressing America’s surging energy crisis by deploying gigawatt-scale nuclear power across the country to provide abundant, clean, reliable baseload energy.

Webb first made his mark by rapidly building climate-resilient projects — from renewable energy installations for the U.S. Army to massive high-tech greenhouses in Appalachia — addressing pressing global needs in food and energy. As the founder of AppHarvest and now co-founder and CEO of The Nuclear Company, Webb is recognized for his ability to secure significant capital, assemble expert teams and deliver ambitious projects under challenging conditions.

His leadership blends bold vision with operational rigor, positioning him at the forefront of sustainable innovation and clean energy advancement. In sum, Webb’s entrepreneurial journey showcases a unique mix of strategic foresight, executional excellence and commitment to solving tomorrow’s challenges today.

Doris Wanjiru is the founder of Lamu Décor, a women-led social enterprise that combines sustainable design, artificial intelligence and community empowerment to protect Kenya’s endangered mangrove forests. Through her leadership, Lamu Décor is pioneering a model that addresses both climate change and economic inequality along the country’s coastal belt.

Lamu Décor works with coastal communities to reduce deforestation by promoting fast-regenerating mango wood as a sustainable alternative to mangrove timber. At the same time, Doris has introduced AI-powered beehive monitoring systems to track pollinator health, migration and ecosystem data within mangrove zones — tools that inform restoration efforts while protecting biodiversity. Her work empowers over 6,000 people living along Kenya’s coast, providing women and youth with training, market access and income-generating opportunities through sustainable furniture production.

Doris’s background in finance and social enterprise, combined with her commitment to environmental regeneration, has positioned her as a bold, systems-level thinker working at the intersection of climate action, circular economy and community resilience. Her vision is to build Africa’s leading climate-positive design brand rooted in indigenous knowledge, digital innovation and environmental justice.

Denica Riadini-Flesch is an Indonesian economist transforming the fashion industry from one of the planet’s biggest polluters into a force for regeneration. As founder of SukkhaCitta, she’s pioneering one of the world’s first farm-to-closet supply chains — restoring ecosystems, empowering rural women and setting a new global standard for environmental justice.

In a sector driven by extraction, Denica is building a system rooted in care. She works directly with smallholder farmers and craftswomen to regenerate soil, eliminate toxic waste, and revive indigenous knowledge. From reintroducing heirloom cotton to inventing zero-waste, botanical dyeing systems, her approach merges ancestral wisdom with scientific rigor to transform degraded land into carbon sinks and rural women into climate leaders.

Her impact includes:

• Over 1,482 lives improved with living wages and education;
• 50+ hectares of soil restored through regenerative practices;
• Elimination of over 4 million liters of toxic dye waste from our water ways;
• Asia’s first fashion Net Zero target verified by the Science Based Targets Initiative;
• The world’s only fashion brand certified as Ethically Handcrafted™.

Recognized as a Rolex Laureate, Cartier Women’s Initiative winner, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Denica’s work is not just a response to the climate crisis — it’s a reimagination of the economy itself.

Through SukkhaCitta, she offers a living blueprint for how industries can shift from linear exploitation to circular regeneration — restoring the Earth while redistributing power. It’s a model where growth no longer costs the planet, and where the future is handcrafted with care, equity and hope.