Varshini Prakash is the Executive Director and co-founder of Sunrise, a movement of young people working to stop climate change, take back our democracy from Big Oil, and elect leaders who will fight for our generation’s health and wellbeing. As an undergrad at the University of Massachusetts, she took on the fossil fuel industry by pushing her university to stop investing in coal, oil, and gas. She lead the campaign to victory after a 2-week long escalation involving thousands of students, alumni, and faculty. Varshini has been a leading voice for young Americans, including last fall when she helped lead a mass demonstration for the Green New Deal that went viral and put climate change on the map for Congress. Varshini‘s work has been featured in the New Yorker, Democracy Now, TeenVogue, BBC, Washington Post and more. She was recently named to the Grist Top 50 Fixers for “people cooking up the boldest, most ambitious solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges”. Varshini currently lives in Boston, MA.

V. Kelly Turner’s research addresses the relationship between institutions, urban design, and the environment through two interrelated questions: (1) How does urban design relate to ecosystem services in cities? and (2) To what extent do social institutions have the capacity to deliver those services? Her approach draws from social-ecological systems frameworks to address urban planning and design problem domains. In recent work she has used this approach to investigate microclimate regulation through New Urbanist design, water and biodiversity management through Homeowners Associations, and stormwater management through green infrastructure interventions.

Her work on water resources has investigated the co-benefits of heat mitigation and water conservation through sustainable design. More recently she is investigating the role of policy, planning, and social norms in driving adoption of green versus grey stormwater control measures in Cleveland, OH, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA and the cumulative effects on watershed hydrology through a collaborative study (NSF-CBET).

Dr. Turner’s training is highly interdisciplinary. She received a Ph.D. in geography from the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, where she was an IGERT Fellow in urban ecology. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the interdisciplinary National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. She recently chaired the Human Dimensions of Global Change specialty group of the American Association of Geographers. Dr. Turner deploys interdisciplinary pedagogy in the classroom and teaches courses in environmentalisms, urban sustainability, and urban ecology.

Paul is a PhD alum in Environment and Sustainability at UCLA interested in contributing to our understanding of how our food systems and labor markets will need to adapt in the face of climate change. Paul uses econometric data analysis techniques to explore topics including hot weather’s impacts on inequality, worker welfare, and food access.  He received a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Math from Harvard University in 2018

Tina May currently leads the innovation team for SUSTAIN at Land O’ Lakes, Inc. where she is tasked with creating innovative solutions for farmers and co-op member owners, harnessing the nexus of policy and business. 

Prior to her time at Land O’ Lakes Tina worked for over 12 years in multiples roles in Government on agriculture and food policy, as a Silicon Valley executive, and co-founder of the first ever DC based lobbying firm to incorporate as a Public Benefit Corporation. 

While in government, Tina served as a political appointee for President Obama, first as the Legislative Director for USDA, then in the second term as Chief of Staff to U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Krysta Harden where she managed the departmental implementation of the 2014 Farm Bill. 

Tina served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry during both 2008 and 2014 Farm Bills. Tina was the policy director during the 2014 Farm Bill where she shepherded the conservation, forestry, trade, and international development work for the Committee. 

Tina started her career as an international grain trader and logistics coordinator with The Scoular Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also worked for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition in Washington, DC. 

Tina hails from a family farm in Stacyville, Iowa and has degrees from the University of Minnesota and the University of London. 

As a recent transplant to Minnesota, Tina lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two young sons where they get down to the family farm every chance they get. 

Janice Min is a media executive, previously serving as the Co-President of the Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Entertainment Group (2010-2017), where she engineered a publishing rebirth hailed as a “stunning transformation” by the New York Times. As editor-in-chief of Us Weekly (2002-2009), she was cited as having transformed modern celebrity culture. She also has served as a consultant to NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment and currently serves as a contributing editor at Time. 

An Emmy winner who has also been named Adweek’s Editor of the Year and received AdAge’s Magazine of the Year honors, she is frequently featured as an expert in media and news, and has been profiled by the New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, and by Alec Baldwin for WNYC, who labeled her “The Turnaround Artist.”

She has been honored with her alma mater Columbia Journalism School’s Alumni Award, and was recognized with the University of Missouri’s Honor Medal for distinguished service in journalism. A Matrix Award winner, she additionally has won two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and been nominated five times.

Min currently sits on the boards of the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, Paley Center and the American Society of Magazine Editors. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband, a fellow graduate of Columbia College, and their three children.

Adeyemi was born in Nigeria, where he obtained his B.S. (with First-Class honors) in Physics at the Federal University of Technology, Akure. Thereafter, he was one of only 50 students selected worldwide in 2009 to study at the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy, under the UNESCO/IAEA study grant. There, he obtained an M.S.-equivalent diploma in Earth System Physics in 2011. He then moved to the United States for graduate school and obtained his Ph.D. in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the University of Miami in 2016, for which he received the Distinguished Koczy Award for outstanding doctoral-level research.

Adeyemi joined Prof. Kok at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, UCLA as a post-doctoral research scientist in 2017. Adeyemi’s research focuses on the impacts of aerosol particles (smoke and desert dust) on regional and global climate, through their interactions with radiation, clouds, and meteorology. His contribution includes making fundamental advances in the understanding of smoke aerosols over the Southern Africa and southeast Atlantic, where he highlighted the previously unexplained presence of moisture within the smoke layer, and the impact of associated southern African easterly jet.  Adeyemi now works to constrain the properties of dust aerosol particles in the atmosphere, and use that to quantify dust impacts on regional and global climate.  He also founded the international peer-mentorship group, Environmental Science Without Borders for CDLS.

Kevin Cannon is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, working under Prof. Todd Yeates to design novel symmetric protein nanostructures for imaging, energy, and biomedical applications.  He received his B.S. in Chemistry from NYU,  grew up in Austin, Texas and graduated from Westwood High School.

Mahala Herron-Rutland is a third-year UCLA student currently majoring in comparative literature and minoring in environmental science. From Oakland California, Mahala has always had an interest in planetary issues, specifically global warming. She even started a global warming club in the 3rd grade. Mahala is overjoyed for this to be her 2nd year in the lab. Her first year she studied paleoaltimetry of the Tibetan plateau, and this year she is more focused on science communication and how geology and environmental issues relate to music with an emphasis on how to make environmental issues mainstream. Upon graduation in 2020, Mahala hopes to either work in the science communication field or the music industry, nevertheless working to make science an accessible language to all people.