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Biographical Information for Workshop Planning Committee Members and Speakers
C.1 WORKSHOP PLANNING COMMITTEE
JEANNE HOLM (Chair) is a leader in open data, education, and civic innovation who empowers people to discover new knowledge and to collaborate to improve life on Earth and beyond. Dr. Holm is the Deputy Mayor for Budget and Innovation of the City of Los Angeles, addressing issues of technology, equity, digital inclusion, and fiscal transparency. She connects public and private partners for innovations ranging from improving digital equity, to using data science for environmental justice, to reimagining government work. She founded the Data Science Federation, partnering universities and cities to create innovative solutions such as using artificial intelligence for traffic safety and machine learning to improve air quality. She was formerly the Evangelist for Open Data for the White House under President Obama, the leader for Africa Open Data for the World Bank, and the Chief Knowledge Architect at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She is a distinguished instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles; a trustee of Claremont Graduate University; a fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics; and an advisor to the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. She leads a startup that promotes equity, education, and social justice through technology and education programs for innovators throughout the world.
JOHN R. BIRGE is the Hobart W. Williams Distinguished Service Professor of Operations Management at the University of Chicago, Booth School
of Business. Previously, Dr. Birge was dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University. He also served as professor and chair of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, where he also established the Financial Engineering Program. He is currently editor-in-chief of Operations Research, former editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming, Series B, and former president of INFORMS. His honors and awards include the IIE Medallion Award, the INFORMS Fellows Award, the MSOM Society Distinguished Fellow Award, the Harold W. Kuhn Prize, the George E. Kimball Medal, the William Pierskalla Award, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He received his MS and PhD from Stanford University in operations research, and an AB in mathematics from Princeton University.
LEAH BROOKS is associate professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University and director of the university’s Center for Washington Area Studies. After receiving her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2005, Dr. Brooks taught at the University of Toronto and McGill University and worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her work to date includes examination of Business Improvement Districts and land assembly to understand the resolution of collective action problems, analysis of the Community Development Block Grant program to understand the political economy of grant giving at the municipal and sub-municipal levels, an investigation of the long-run impacts of streetcar investments in Los Angeles on urban form, and an analysis of whether and why U.S. infrastructure costs have increased. She is currently working on understanding the long-run impacts of the Washington, DC, 1968 civil disturbance and the impact of ecommerce on how retail establishments cluster. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Economics, the National Tax Journal, and Real Estate Economics.
JARED L. COHON is university professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy and president emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. At the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Dr. Cohon chairs the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems. Among previous committees on which he served, he chaired the Committee on Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles and the committee that produced The Hidden Costs of Energy. He was a professor of geography and environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 to 1992, where he also served as vice provost for research from 1986 to 1992, associate dean of engineering from 1983 to 1986, and assistant dean of engineering
from 1981 to 1983. Following his tenure at Johns Hopkins, he was dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and professor of environmental systems analysis at Yale University from 1992 to 1997. He served as president of Carnegie Mellon from 1997 to 2013. Dr. Cohon also served as Legislative Assistant for Energy and Environment on the staff of U.S. Senator Moynihan from 1977 to 1978. In January 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Cohon to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. In 1997, Dr. Cohon assumed the role of chair of the board, a position he held until 2002. President George W. Bush appointed him in 2002 and President Barack Obama reappointed him to serve on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Dr. Cohon co-chaired the Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories from 2014 to 2016. He serves on the boards of Trane Technologies and four nonprofit organizations, including the Health Effects Institute, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a BS in civil engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree and PhD in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
KATHERINE BENNETT ENSOR is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University, where she serves as director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (cofes.rice.edu) and creator of the Kinder Institute’s Urban Data Platform (kinderudp.org). Dr. Ensor served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 1999 through 2013 and has shaped data science at Rice as a member of the campus-wide hiring committee. Her research focuses on the development of statistical and data science methods for practical problems. Her expertise is dependent data covering time, space, and dimension with applied interests in finance, energy, environment, health, and risk management. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been recognized for her leadership, scholarship, and mentoring. Dr. Ensor is the 2022 president of ASA. She served as vice president of ASA from 2016 to 2018 and as a member of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics from 2014 to 2020. Dr. Ensor holds a BSE and an MS in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University. Dr. Ensor is a member of the Texas A&M College of Science Academy of Distinguished Former Students.
SAMUEL LABI is a professor of transportation and infrastructure systems engineering at Purdue University’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering. Dr. Labi received a BS from the University of Science and Technology, Ghana, in 1987, and MS and PhD from Purdue University in 1998 and
2001, respectively. Dr. Labi has served as principal investigator for 40 research projects sponsored by or affiliated with the U.S. Federal Highway Administration and the Indiana Department of Transportation, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Bank, Nextrans Transportation Center, and the State of Illinois Auditor General’s Department. He is the author or co-author of more than 96 scientific articles in technical journals, 180 conference presentations, and 2 textbooks used in universities worldwide: Transportation Decision Making (Wiley) and Introduction to Civil Engineering Systems (Wiley). His research awards include the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Frank Masters Award in 2014 for outstanding and innovative work in advancing the area of transportation systems. He received the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ 2014 award for best high-value research for investigating the impacts of a proposed legislation on truck operations. (The Senate subsequently passed this bill into law.)
KRISTIN LAUTER is the director of West Coast Research Science for Meta AI Research (FAIR). Dr. Lauter was the president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2015 to 2017. Her mathematical research focuses on the interface between machine learning and cryptography, with a focus on cloud security and health and genomic privacy. She is particularly known for her work on homomorphic encryption, elliptic curve cryptography, and post-quantum cryptography. Dr. Lauter was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, from 1999 to 2021 and partner research manager of the Cryptography and Privacy Group from 2008 to 2021; her group developed Microsoft SEAL, an open-source library for homomorphic encryption. In 2018, she also co-founded and led the Urban Innovation Initiative at Microsoft Research, with projects on Clean Air for All, and AI for Cities. Dr. Lauter is an elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected honorary member of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society. Dr. Lauter received her BA, MS, and PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, in 1990, 1991, and 1996. She was a Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan (1996–1999). She has published more than 100 papers and holds more than 50 patents.
ROBERT J. LEMPERT is a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation and director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. Dr. Lempert’s research focuses on risk management and decision making under conditions of deep uncertainty. Dr. Lempert’s work aims to advance the state of the
art for organizations managing risk in today’s conditions of face-paced, transformative, and surprising change and helping organizations adopt these approaches to help make proper stewardship of the future more commonly practiced. Dr. Lempert is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a coordinating lead author for Working Group II of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report, a chapter lead for the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment, chair of the peer review panel for California’s Fourth Climate Assessment, a member of California’s Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group, and has been a member of numerous study panels for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, including America’s Climate Choices and Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate. Dr. Lempert was the Inaugural EADS Distinguished Visitor in Energy and Environment at the American Academy in Berlin and the inaugural president of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (http://www.deepuncertainty.org). A professor of policy analysis in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, Dr. Lempert is an author of the book Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Longer-Term Policy Analysis.
SUE McNEIL is professor of civil and environmental engineering and of urban affairs and public policy at the University of Delaware. Dr. McNeil is also director of the University Transportation Center and the Disaster Research Center. She was formerly director of the Urban Transportation Center and professor in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Prior to joining UIC, she was a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research and teaching interests focus on transportation infrastructure management, with emphasis on the application of advanced technologies, economic analysis, analytical methods, and computer applications. Dr. McNeil is a former member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Executive Committee and the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment. She served on the National Research Council committees on Review of the National Transportation Science and Technology Strategy and Study of the Regulation of Weights, Lengths, and Widths of Commercial Motor Vehicles, and chaired the TRB Committee on Transportation Asset Management from 2004 to 2010. She is a founding associate editor for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Journal of Infrastructure Systems and currently serves as its editor-in-chief. Dr. McNeil earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and civil engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and an MS and a PhD in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
MONICA SANDERS is founder of the Undivide Project, an organization dedicated to creating climate resilience in underserved communities via Internet infrastructure and service-centered Internet of Things solutions. She also holds a faculty appointment at the Georgetown University Law Center and is a senior fellow at the Tulane University Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. Professor Sanders’s homeland practical experience includes serving as a Senior Committee Counsel for both the House of Representatives and Senate Committees on Homeland Security. In those roles, she focused on oversight of disaster response and recovery programs, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure protection. She also served as the senior legal advisor for International Response and Programs at the American Red Cross, and as an attorney for the Small Business Administration during the Hurricane Maria and western wildfires responses. Previously, she studied security and defense–civilian coordination in the European Union Visitor’s Program and remains involved in crisis response operations as part of the Team Rubicon USA and UNDP rosters.
KAREN C. SETO is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at Yale University. An urban and land change scientist, Dr. Seto is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. She uses satellite remote sensing, field interviews, and modeling methods to understand how urbanization will affect the planet, including land change, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has extensive fieldwork experience in Asia, especially China and India; she has conducted urbanization research in China for 20 years and in India for more than 10. Dr. Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She led the urban mitigation chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th (2022) and 5th (2014) Assessment Reports. She was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Global Environmental Change. From 2000 to 2008, she was on the faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received many awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers. Dr. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a PhD in geography from Boston University.
SARAH SLAUGHTER is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO)/president of the Built Environment Coalition, a research and education nonprofit (501c3) focused on community resilience and sustainability. Dr. Slaughter is a subject-matter expert on community resilience, and currently advises government agencies on strategies for improving resilience and sustainability. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Construction. She currently serves on the Green Building Advisory Committee to advise the U.S. General Services Administration and the federal government, and is co-chair of the Resilient America Roundtable in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previously, Dr. Slaughter was a visiting lecturer on resilience in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Associate Director for Buildings and Infrastructure in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and was co-founder and faculty head of the Sustainability Initiative in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before holding those positions, Dr. Slaughter was founder and CEO of MOCA Systems, Inc., a software-enabled construction program management company, and before founding MOCA, she was an MIT professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and earlier, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh University. She has served on several regional, national, and international advisory committees, and on editorial boards of professional publications. She previously served on the Board of Directors for the Charles River Watershed Association; Retroficiency, Inc.; Eastern Research Group/AEA Technology, Inc.; and MOCA Systems, Inc. She received her doctorate, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees from MIT.
BARBARA BROWN WILSON is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Architecture, and co-founder and faculty director at the UVA Democracy Initiative Center for the Redress of Inequity Through Community-Engaged Scholarship (The Equity Center). Dr. Wilson’s research and teaching focus on the history, theory, ethics, and practice of planning for climate justice, and on the role of urban social movements in the built world. She writes for both academic and mainstream audiences and is the author of Resilience for All: Striving for Equity through Community-Driven Design (Island Press, 2018), and co-author of Questioning Architectural Judgement: The Problem of Codes in the United States (Routledge, 2013). Her research is often change-oriented, meaning that she collaborates with community partners to identify opportunities to move our communities, and the field of urban planning, toward social and environmental justice.
C.2 WORKSHOP SPEAKERS
KAREN ABRAMS is the Director of City Planning for Pittsburgh, where she oversees the city’s efforts to establish and sustain a consistent approach to land use that incorporates sustainability, city design, resilience, equity, and opportunity. As Director of City Planning, Abrams leads a team charged with undertaking initiatives such as neighborhood planning and resilient communities to performance incentives for the riverfront development and comprehensive planning. City Planning is responsible for the City Planning Commission, Art Commission, Zoning Board of Adjustment, and the Historic Review Commission. Abrams previously served as program officer for equitable development for the Heinz Endowments, a role that focused on infusing equity into the foundation’s redevelopment funding initiatives in the Pittsburgh region. Her work involved helping the Endowments develop and implement a range of grantmaking that supported sustainable investments in neighborhood-level projects as well as city- and region-wide initiatives. Before joining the Endowments, Abrams was the community and diversity affairs manager at the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh. Her work contributed to investments ranging from thousands of dollars for small-scale vacant lot improvements to a $30 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Choice Neighborhood Implementation Grant. Abrams earned a bachelor’s degree in African and African American studies from the University of Virginia and an MS in sustainable systems from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She also was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
LUCIA ATHENS is the City of Austin’s first chief sustainability officer, a position she has served in for nearly 12 years. A leader in climate action and green building, Athens brings more than 30 years of experience and wisdom to the sustainability table. Her latest book is titled The Sustainability Revolutionists: Heroes and Hope for Our Common Future. Her previous book Building an Emerald City (Island Press) is a green building guide that is both inspirational and practical. A native Texan, Athens makes her home in Austin with her husband and two adorable rescue dogs.
DAVID BANKS obtained an MS in applied mathematics from Virginia Tech in 1982, followed by a PhD in statistics in 1984. Dr. Banks won a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, which he took at Berkeley, working with David Blackwell. In 1986, he was a visiting assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then joined the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon in 1987. In 1997 he went to the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, then served as chief statistician of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and finally joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002. In 2003, he returned to academics at Duke University.
BRIAN BEACH is an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Beach earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 and his BA from the University of Washington in 2010. His research spans the fields of economic history, public economics, and health. Much of his work examines the extent to which government policies and institutions affect social welfare.
CHRIS BLATTMAN is an economist and political scientist who studies global conflict, crime, and poverty. Dr. Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Pearson Institute. Dr. Blattman also co-leads the university’s Development Economics Center and the Obama Foundation Scholars Program. The questions that Dr. Blattman is most passionate about: Why are some people and societies violent, oppressive, and poor? And what can we do about it? He works in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Most of his current research is with armed groups, gangs, organized crime, and the people who join violent organizations. This work involves a blend of qualitative interviews, large-scale surveys, statistical analysis, and field experiments. Dr. Blattman also wants to bring big ideas and research to a general audience, which is why he wrote Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace.
KYLE BUCK is a human geographer with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Office of Research and Development in Gulf Breeze, Florida. Buck’s background is in chronic disease epidemiology and the impact of community disparities on resilience and sustainability outcomes. His work with EPA has included the development of models and frameworks to assess the human–environment interface, including natural hazard risk assessments, a child well-being application, and residential segregation impacts on sustainability. His current research focuses on model development that links community infrastructure to household and neighborhood sustainability/resilience outcomes and the interpretation of social characteristics in the context of community revitalization efforts.
ANITA CHANDRA is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. The division also manages RAND’s Center to Advance Racial
Equity Policy. Dr. Chandra leads studies on civic well-being and urban planning; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; public health emergency preparedness; effects of military deployment; equity, health in all policies, and advancing a culture of health; and child health and development. Throughout her career, Dr. Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community well-being and to build more robust systems, implementation, and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the United States and globally; partnering with private-sector organizations to develop the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to reform data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Dr. Chandra has served on a few National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees, mostly focused on community resilience and disaster response.
RICHARD CICCARONE is the president of Merritt Research Services, an Investortools Co., a municipal bond data and research company created in 1985. Merritt’s municipal bond credit data and analytical package covers more than 10,000 municipal bond borrowers. Most of the nation’s largest tax-exempt fixed income institutional investors, dealers, bond insurance companies, and separate account managers among others are subscribers through CreditScope. Ciccarone has held executive and analytical positions in investment management and municipal bond research as well as the oversight of Merritt Research throughout most of his career, which began in 1977. Previously, he served as chief research officer at McDonnell Investment Management, LLC, co-head of fixed income and municipal asset management at Van Kampen Investments, Inc. (Morgan Stanley), and head of tax-exempt research at EVEREN Securities, Inc. (previously called Kemper Securities). He has authored articles for professional journals, such as the Municipal Finance Journal, and other books and online publications, including The Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government and the Handbook of Municipal Bonds. He was also founder, co-owner, and contributor to MuniNetguide.com. He is a member of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Urban Planning and Public Administration Dean’s Advisory Council and the UIC Government Finance Research Center’s External Advisory Committee. In addition, he has served as an elected trustee of the Village of Hinsdale, Illinois, as well as a board member on several civic and educational not-for-profit organizations. He earned his BA in political science at Miami University (Ohio) and his MA from the University of Akron in public administration and urban studies.
JOSEPH CORDES is a nationally recognized scholar on the measurement of benefits and costs of government programs. Dr. Cordes has developed and taught a one-semester course on benefit-cost analysis and has directed several PhD dissertations and more than 100 graduate student projects involving the application of benefit-cost analysis to a wide range of public and nonprofit sector programs, including government regulations. He has also received research grants from the Department of Homeland Security on measuring costs of homeland security regulations. In 2004, he co-authored a report for the National Academy of Engineering on River Basing and Coastal Systems Planning Within the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which included a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis. He is a past president of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Professor Cordes earned a BA (economics) from Stanford University, and a PhD (economics) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
MICHAEL CREMIN is a practicing principal engineer with the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s (MnDOT’s) Asset Management Program Office, with a degree from University of Minnesota, and has gained 11 years of implementing asset management programs (7 years of private consulting and 4 years of state DOT) including data-driven risk-based decision engineering support. At MnDOT, Cremin focuses on ancillary asset management maturity development for Transportation Asset Management System software utilization (240 asset class codes), Transportation Asset Management Plan development (12 asset classes), Asset Management Strategic Implementation Plan development (72 asset classes), and Mobile Collection.
LAUREN DAVIS is a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Dr. Davis received her B.S. in computational mathematics from Rochester Institute of Technology, MS in industrial engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and PhD in industrial engineering from North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on decision making under uncertainty, primarily using stochastic optimization techniques (Markov Decision Processes, stochastic programming) and simulation. Her work has been applied to solve optimal stocking, transportation scheduling, and distribution decisions in for-profit and nonprofit supply chains. She has more than 40 peer-reviewed journal papers and refereed conference proceedings addressing issues related to inventory management, transportation scheduling, port operations, and emergency response in areas such as food supply chains, food security, port operations, and humanitarian relief. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Homeland
Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, totaling more than $4 million in grant funding. Additionally, her research examining hunger relief supply chains has been featured in CNN’s Great Big Story and NSF’s Discovery article series. She is currently the principal investigator for an NSF-funded National Research Traineeship grant that explores food security and hunger relief using computational data science.
RICHARD DE NEUFVILLE is professor of engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. de Neufville wrote the book Flexibility in Engineering Design (MIT Press, 2011) with Professor Stefan Scholtes of Cambridge University and teaches that subject in the MIT Systems Design and Management Program. He has authored six other textbooks and supervised more than 250 dissertations and theses. As founder of the graduate Technology and Policy Program, he received the Sizer Award for the Most Significant Contribution to MIT Education. He served as an Airborne Ranger officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and as a White House Fellow for U.S. President Johnson.
JORDAN R. FISCHBACH, PhD, is the director of planning and policy research at the Water Institute of the Gulf. Before joining the Water Institute, Dr. Fischbach was codirector of the RAND Climate Resilience Center, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and an affiliate faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Since 2010, Dr. Fischbach has led a wide range of policy research efforts focused on climate adaptation, urban resilience, water resources management, coastal planning, and post-disaster recovery. He also serves as a co-investigator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) center, which has the goal to support the effective utilization of climate science and the building of adaptive capacity and resilience to climate variability and change in the Mid-Atlantic region.
ALICE C. HILL is an expert on building resilience to catastrophic risks. Hill previously served as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council staff, where she led the development of national policy, including executive orders related to natural disasters, national security, and climate change. Prior to this, Hill served as senior counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At DHS, she led the formulation of the department’s first-ever climate adaptation plan and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics. Hill currently serves as the David
M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She is the author of The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 and co-author of Building a Resilient Tomorrow. She currently serves on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund and Munich Re Group’s U.S.-based companies. In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis. Earlier in her career, Hill was a supervising judge on both the Los Angeles Municipal and Superior Courts as well as a federal prosecutor and chief of the white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, California.
LOREN HOPKINS leads the Data Services and Data Science and Statistics programs at the Houston Health Department, serves as the City of Houston Chief Environmental Science Officer, and is a Professor in the Practice in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. In this dual capacity, Dr. Hopkins conducts applied research and uses the results to inform policies at the City of Houston to improve the health of the community.
RISHEE K. JAIN is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Urban Informatics Lab at Stanford University. Dr. Jain’s research focuses on the development of data-driven and sociotechnical solutions to sustainability problems facing the urban built environment and lies at the intersection of civil engineering, data analytics, and social science. He is a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a Building Innovator Fellowship from the Department of Energy. Dr. Jain earned his BS in civil and environmental engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and his MS/PhD from Columbia University as part of a joint IGERT program between civil engineering and urban planning.
RENATA KONRAD is an associate professor of industrial engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Konrad’s research focuses on the application of operations research methodologies to social justice issues and healthcare to improve the quality, timeliness, and efficiency of operations. This research includes using optimization and simulation to inform human trafficking awareness campaigns, to locate housing, to understand the relationship between illegal fishing and exploited labor, and to improve access to primary care. Dr. Konrad’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation and was featured in the 2019 United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. She has served on the U.S. Department of Transportation Advisory Committee
on Human Trafficking and on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security–Science and Technology, Human Trafficking Advisory Committee, and in January 2022 returned from Ukraine, where she was on a Fulbright Award. Dr. Konrad earned a PhD in industrial engineering from Purdue University and a master’s degree from the University of Toronto.
KIMBERLY WALKER LaGRUE heads the Office of Information Technology and Innovation for the City of New Orleans. LaGrue and her team deliver stable IT services to city government and develop strategies to ensure equitable growth of technology services throughout New Orleans. In 2018, she was appointed chief information officer by Mayor LaToya Cantrell, and assigned to lead the city’s digital equity and smart city strategies, driving the mayor’s goal to provide all residents equal access to technology and make New Orleans a connected, data-driven smart city. A New Orleans native with more than 25 years of IT experience, LaGrue has spent most of her career developing technology solutions for local government. She is the first president of the Cities Today Leadership Institute for North America, and an advisory board member of the Internet of Things Consortium. As fierce advocate for local broadband development, she is personally committed to digital equity, digital literacy, and connecting the underserved communities of New Orleans.
CRIS B. LIBAN, PE, serves as chief sustainability officer at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro). Dr. Liban has worked at LA Metro since 2003 and has grown his agency’s environmental and sustainability practice into one of the most progressive and forward-looking in the country, implementing more than 150 sustainability initiatives to date. He is working to ensure that $140 billion in capital projects that are programmed for the next 40 years are sustainable, climate-adapted, and resilient for the more than 10 million people of Los Angeles County. Many of these are to be completed in time for the 2028 Olympics. Dr. Liban holds concurrent appointments in the State of California Green Bonds Development Committee, Los Angeles County Beach Commission, and the City of Los Angeles Board of Transportation Commissioners. He is currently the chapter lead in writing the Transportation Chapter of the forthcoming Fifth National Climate Assessment. He held previous political appointments as a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology and the California Climate Safe Infrastructure Working Group. Liban is the chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Sustainability, where he is leading the effort to develop a global sustainable infrastructure standard, and guidance documents that incorporate climate science into both the practice of civil engineering and
procurement and execution of sustainable infrastructures. He is currently the co-chair of the American Public Transportation Association’s Sustainability Commitment Committee. He conceptualized and co-led the formation of the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure in 2019, which now has become a global coalition of almost 200,000 engineers and more than 10,000 cities around the world. Liban previously received in 2016 the Philippines’ highest civilian honor for Filipinos living overseas, the Pamana ng Pilipino Award, from Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. In addition, because of his singular focus on building a sustainable transportation system that is also economically and socially beneficial to all levels of society, Dr. Liban was awarded the Engineering-News Record’s 2020 Award of Excellence. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Construction in 2021 and a distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2022. Dr. Liban has degrees in geology, civil engineering, and environmental science and engineering.
JOHN MACDONALD studies crime and violence, race and ethnic disparities in criminal justice, and the impact of public policy on safety. A current focus of Dr. Macdonald’s work is on examining how the science of urban planning can make our cities healthier, safer, and livable. This work is highlighted in his 2019 book Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning (Princeton University Press). The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and private foundations helped support the research on changing places. He is also actively studying racial disparities in criminal justice, and ways to reduce these disparities through policy and program reforms.
ELISE MILLER-HOOKS holds the Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair in Infrastructure Engineering at George Mason University, is an advisor to the World Bank Group, and is founding editor-in-chief of IFORS/Elsevier’s Sustainability Analytics and Modeling journal. Dr. Miller-Hooks previously served as a program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation and on the faculties of the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, and Duke University. Dr. Miller-Hooks received her PhD in civil engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and BS in civil engineering from Lafayette College. She has expertise in multi-hazard civil infrastructure resilience quantification and protection; disruption planning and response; transportation systems engineering; sustainability; intermodal rail- and maritime-based freight transport; real-time routing and fleet management: paratransit, delivery, ridesharing, and bikeways; stochastic and dynamic network algorithms; and collaborative and multi-objective decision making.
MARIE LYNN MIRANDA is an accomplished and recognized data science scholar and communicator with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications focused on the nexus of health, education, equity, and the environment and with more than $65 million in federal, corporate, and foundation funding. Dr. Miranda specializes in spatial analytic approaches, especially targeted at understanding how the environment shapes health and well-being among children and those from low-resource communities. Dr. Miranda is a leader in the rapidly evolving field of geospatial health informatics and has developed global cultural and scientific competence through extensive work on four continents. She founded and continues to lead the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI), a research, education, and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper. CEHI’s work leverages research, stakeholder engagement, and advocacy to effect environmental policy change. CEHI received the 2008 Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Award. Dr. Miranda is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Duke University, where she earned her AB in mathematics and economics and was named a Truman Scholar. She has a PhD and MA from Harvard University, where she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of Sigma Xi. She serves on the boards of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund.
SAFIYA U. NOBLE is an Internet studies scholar and professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she serves as the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). Dr. Noble holds affiliations in the School of Education and Information Studies, and is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, where she is a commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic discrimination, which prompted her founding of a nonprofit, Equity Engine, to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP–Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient. Her academic research focuses on the Internet and its impact
on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. She is regularly sought out for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of network news and podcasts. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies, as featured in Noema magazine. Dr. Noble is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a member of several academic journal advisory boards, and holds a PhD and an MS in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in sociology from California State University, Fresno, where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the iSchool Alumni Association, and is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. She was recently appointed as a board member for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, America’s Black think tank.
DESTENIE NOCK is a leader in energy justice and sustainable energy transition trade-off analysis. In her role as an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy, Dr. Nock creates optimization and decision analysis tools that evaluate the sustainability, equity, and reliability of power systems in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. She has pioneered the development of algorithms to identify hidden forms of energy poverty (e.g., forgone heating and cooling in low-income households). Dr. Nock is the recipient of multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) grants on energy, resilience, and energy justice. Dr. Nock holds a PhD in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and an Offshore Wind Energy IGERT Fellow. She earned an MSc in leadership for sustainable development at Queen’s University of Belfast, and two BS degrees in electrical engineering and applied math at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
Mayor SAMUEL PARHAM, a native of Petersburg, Virginia, graduated from Petersburg High School in 1993 and earned an associate of science degree from Richard Bland College in 1996. While attending Richard
Bland College, Mayor Parham founded the Multi-Cultural Alliance, co-founded the Rotaract Club, and participated in the College Players drama club. He later attended Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Virginia, and earned a bachelor of science in business management in 1999. In addition to serving the Petersburg community as Mayor, he is also currently the director of business operations with Colonial Cleaning Service in Petersburg, Virginia. Colonial Cleaning Service has been a family owned and operated business since its beginnings in 1981. Mayor Parham has held several leadership positions in the area including Governor of the Petersburg Breakfast and Lunch Rotary Clubs and Colonial Heights Rotary Club and also President of the Petersburg Breakfast Rotary Club. Mayor Parham was first elected to Petersburg City Council in November 2014. In January 2015, he was elected by his fellow council members to serve as Vice Mayor. In January 2017, he was elected by the city council to serve as Mayor and has continued to be reelected by the council for this position. Mayor Parham is currently serving as a board member for the Virginia Gateway Region, board member for the Batter-sea Foundation, vice chair for the Crater Planning Board, member of the Crater Workforce Chief Elected Officials Consortium, and member of the VCU Alumni Association. Mayor Parham resides in Petersburg, Virginia, with his wife and two children.
WILL PICKERING was named the executive director of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) in June 2020. Prior to transitioning to chief executive officer in 2021, Pickering served as the deputy executive director and director of public affairs at PWSA. Prior to joining PWSA in fall 2016, Pickering was manager of communications and government relations at DC Water. There, he managed the communications program and spearheaded DC Water’s interactions with the federal, district, and neighboring local governments. Pickering has also held several positions in the local and federal government. He has a bachelor of science in political science from Santa Clara University and received his certificate in public management from The George Washington University.
ALEX PUDLIN is the senior advisor for data and insights at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, Pudlin worked as the director of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Innovation Team, where he led a team of designers, data scientists, and project managers who worked to address some of the region’s most pressing challenges. Prior to this role, Pudlin worked as the senior data scientist on the Innovation Team. Before joining the Innovation Team in 2015, he worked as a project analyst for Xerox in Los Angeles, working on Los Angeles’s smart-parking project, LA Express Park, which utilizes sensor
technology to support demand-based meter rates in downtown Los Angeles. In this role, he interpreted occupancy algorithms to determine where meter rates should change and determined patterns of disabled placard use in the project area. Before Xerox, Pudlin graduated with a master’s in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he studied transportation planning/policy and community economic development. While at UCLA, he conducted research and produced reports that included a study on household workers’ commuting patterns and a geospatial analysis of exercise accessibility in Los Angeles neighborhoods.
PATRICK REED’s Decision Analytics for Complex Systems research group has a strong focus on the sustainability of food-energy-water systems given conflicting demands from ecosystem services, expanding populations, and climate change. The tools developed in Dr. Reed’s group bridge complexity science, risk management, economics, multi-objective decision making, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. Engineering design and decision support software developed by Dr. Reed is being used broadly in academic, governmental, and industrial application areas with thousands of users globally.
BILL ROBERT of Spy Pond Partners has more than 25 years of experience in the transportation industry. Robert’s work focuses on transportation asset management (TAM), as well as the development and implementation of asset management and decision support systems. He is currently leading research for the Federal Highway Administration to identify leading indicators of safety, infrastructure, and system performance. He recently served as principal investigator of National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 23-06 to develop guidance for asset valuation to support TAM. Also, he recently he served as principal investigator for NCHRP Project 19-12 on TAM financial plans, NCHRP Project 08-103 on cross asset resource allocation, and a series of four Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) projects on transit asset management/state of good repair. In addition, he recently assisted in the development of highway and transit asset management plans for more than a dozen agencies. Robert is a former member of the Transportation Research Board committees on Asset Management, Bridge Management, and Transit Management and Performance.
JOSEPH SALVO is a Fellow within the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia. Dr. Salvo has extensive experience in “all things census,” making presentations on demographic subjects to a wide range of groups, and the management of major demographic
projects involving the analysis of large data sets for local applications related to policy formulation, needs assessments, and program planning and implementation. Dr. Salvo’s work has been crucial to the formation of more widespread evidence-based policy, as his expertise in census data history, methods, operations, and products makes him uniquely able to analyze demographic data and explain this information to policy makers, who are in turn able to understand and employ this data during policy formation. For more than 25 years, Dr. Salvo was the chief demographer for New York City, in the Department of City Planning. He is currently senior advisor to the National Conference on Citizenship and serves on the Committee on National Statistics Panel to Evaluate the Quality of the 2020 Census. He was co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Working Group on Data Confidentiality and 2020 Census data products and has worked on behalf of the American Statistical Association’s Task Force conducting an analysis of 2020 Census data quality. He has given testimony before the House Sub-Committee on Oversight and Reform on multiple occasions and served as an expert witness in litigation involving the census.
COSTA SAMARAS serves in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Principal Assistant Director for Energy and OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy. As part of the OSTP senior leadership team, Dr. Samaras works with the OSTP Director, the Deputy Director for Energy, and other OSTP senior staff in coordinating federal activities on topics such as U.S. energy science and technology policy; the suitability of energy technologies for meeting U.S. energy and climate goals; opportunities for energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment investments; and advancing federal government-wide initiatives to further diversity, equity, and inclusion of the U.S. scientific and energy sector workforce. Prior to joining OSTP, he was an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation at Carnegie Mellon University.
JEN SANDERS is cofounder and executive director of the Dallas Innovation Alliance (DIA), a 501c3 public–private partnership dedicated to supporting Dallas’s smart cities strategy. At the DIA, Sanders has collated a network of three dozen members and works with more than 20 departments at the City of Dallas. DIA’s Smart Cities Living Lab is the fastest-to-market smart cities initiative in the country. The DIA is currently working on projects related to equity, focused on mobility, digital/Internet access, and public safety; and launched a regional initiative in 2020, the North Texas Innovation Alliance (NTXIA). She is community-driven, serving as
past-president of the Mayor’s Star Council, board member of the Suicide & Crisis Center, and Better Block, among others. In 2019, she received the UN Day Global Leadership Award, has been named to Dallas Business Journal’s 40 under 40 and Top Women in Technology, State Scoop’s Top Women in Technology, and Tech Week 100. She graduated from the University of Virginia.
BRITTANY SELLERS is the assistant director of sustainability and resilience in the City of Orlando’s Green Works Office, where she is advancing and supporting policies and programs designed to meet the City’s ambitious sustainability and climate goals, as well as creating the City’s first resilience plan. Dr. Sellers received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Flagler College and earned her master’s and PhD in human factors psychology from the University of Central Florida, where her research focused on the influencing of sustainable behaviors through a combined approach of motivation and design.
DAVID SHMOYS is the Laibe/Acheson Professor and Director of the Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society at Cornell University. Dr. Shmoys obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Cornell University faculty. Dr. Shmoys is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, INFORMS, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator; and was awarded the 2013 INFORMS Lanchester Prize and the 2018 INFORMS Wagner Prize. His research on algorithms for discrete optimization problems has seen application in scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, computational sustainability, and most recently, data-driven decision making in the sharing economy.
KIRK T. STEUDLE is senior vice president of Econolite Systems, focused on integrating technology into transportation, and excellence in Intelligent Transportation System design, deployment, operations, and maintenance, including its subsidiary CAVita. Steudle retired from State of Michigan service in October 2018 after a 31-year career and served as director of the Michigan Department of Transportation from 2006 to 2018. He also served as the interim president and chief executive officer of the American Center for Mobility from August 2018 until March 2019. Steudle is a noted expert in surface transportation and a nationally recognized leader in the integration of technology into transportation and the development of connected vehicle technology, and served as chair for the Intelligent
Transportation Society of America Board of Directors in 2015 and as a member of the Program Advisory Committee to the U.S. Department of Transportation. His resume includes chairing the Transportation Research Board executive committee in 2014 and serving as the 2011–2012 president to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. He is the current president of the Engineering Society of Detroit and is a board member of the Center for Automotive Research. Steudle is a graduate of Lawrence Technological University, where he received a bachelor’s of science in construction engineering. He also serves on the board of trustees for the university and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2012.
SHELBY SWITZER is a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, helping governments build/buy software collaboratively through Beeck’s Intergovernmental Software Collaborative, and they serve as a technical advisor and open-source community manager for Justice40 as a member of the U.S. Digital Service. Their career in civic technology spans a decade and includes volunteering with Code for America brigades across the country, contributing to open-source and open-standards projects, working at tech companies serving governments and community organizations, and leading various technology projects at the U.S. Digital Service. They write regularly on civic technology and digital public infrastructure on their blog, Civic Unrest.
RICHARD Y. WANG is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Program. Dr. Wang is a pioneer and leader in the research and practice of the chief data officer (CDO). He has significant credentials across government, industry, and academia. He conceived and chaired the Inaugural MIT–Army CDO Forum, and established the CDO Forum as an annual event at MIT. In addition, he has been chairing the Annual MIT CDOIQ Symposium since 2007. Dr. Wang was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management for almost a decade. From 2005 to 2009, he was appointed as a visiting university professor of Information Quality, University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is an honorary professor at Xi’An Jiao Tong University, China. Dr. Wang has put the term information quality on the intellectual map with myriad publications. In 1996, Dr. Wang organized the premier International Conference on Information Quality, for which he has served as the general conference chair and currently serves as chair of the board. Dr. Wang’s books on information quality include Journey to Data Quality (MIT Press, 2006), Information Quality: Advances in Management Information Systems (M.E. Sharpe, 2005), Introduction to Information Quality (MITIQ Publications, 2005), Data Quality (Kluwer Academic,
2001), and Quality Information and Knowledge (Prentice Hall, 1999). Dr. Wang has been instrumental in the establishment of the PhD and master’s of science in information quality degree program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the Stuart Madnick IQ Best Paper Award for the International Conference on Information Quality, the comprehensive IQ PhD dissertations website, and the Donald Ballou & Harry Pazer IQ PhD Dissertation Award. Dr. Wang is the recipient of the 2005 DAMA International Achievement Award. Previous recipients of this award include Codd for inventing the relational data model and Chen for the entity relationship model. In 2005, he received a certificate of appreciation from the director of Central Intelligence and a thank you letter from the director of National Intelligence. From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Wang served as the Deputy CDO and Chief Data Quality Officer of the U.S. Army, for which he received letters of appreciation from the Army’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), and the CIO at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He received a PhD in information technology from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1985.
VICTOR M. ZAVALA is the Baldovin–DaPra Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a computational mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Zavala holds a BSc from Universidad Iberoamericana and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, both in chemical engineering. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Process Control, Mathematical Programming Computation, and Computers & Chemical Engineering. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy Early Career awards and of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. His research interests include statistics, control, and optimization and applications to energy and environmental systems.
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