Sarah Bergmann works at the intersections of ecology, culture, environmental philosophy, and design. She was the designer and leader of the Pollinator Pathway, a civic project that brought together thousands of participants around a park designed to prioritize density within urban environments and sustain nature beyond city limits. She brings experience in the development of well-designed and researched civic projects, as well as in mobilizing communities around collective design for action.

Aaron Hirsh is a scientist, writer, and entrepreneur with deep interests in environmental education and ecological regeneration. Aaron’s research has appeared in a variety of journals, including Nature, Science, and PNAS, while his writings have been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Best American series, and FSG. As an entrepreneur, Aaron has been involved in bio- and ed-tech. He was also a founder of The Vermilion Sea Institute and Board Chair for Ecology Project International. He holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford.

Ben Roberts is science educator, publishing professional, and the CEO of Codon Learning. Codon Learning’s aim is to catalyze the widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching principles. Prior to founding Codon, Ben founded Roberts and Company, a STEM publisher, which was acquired by Macmillan Learning in 2016. He then served as VP of STEM for two years.

Brandon McWilliams is a science communications fellow for the USDA Forest Service Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center, and a program assistant at CE. They have a particular interest in the link between climate narratives, mental health, and behavior change, and have worked extensively in environmental education and habitat restoration.

Chana Leonorovitz is an analyst and program management professional for CE, where they assist with business operations, financial management and compliance, and research. They have experience with relational databases, documentation, and data analysis. In addition, they have worked as an actuarial analyst, and bring a wide range of skills to bear in their work with CE's labs.

Dr. David Kaplan is an Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering Sciences and Director of the H.T. Odum Center for Wetlands Research at the University of Florida. His research focuses on linkages among the hydrological cycle, ecosystem processes, and human activities, with the goal of advancing natural resources conservation and management. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Biological Engineering from the University of Florida.

Dr. Elliott Washington is an Assistant Program Lead with the Agriculture and Natural Resources program at Prairie View A&M University. He is an experienced GIS technician and researcher, and holds a Ph.D. in Urban Forestry and Natural Resources from Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College at Baton Rouge. Dr. Washington assists CE with technical and logistical guidance for the Prairie View reforestation project, and assists private land owners enrolled in our reforestation program.

Dr. Elliott White Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University. He is a coastal wetland scientist that uses an interdisciplinary (ecohydrology, remote sensing, and biogeochemistry) approach to understand how coastal vegetation is being affected by climate change.

Dr. Julie Tierney is an ecologist with interests in biogeochemical cycling and its relationship to global change, ecosystem resilience, and food systems. She is currently a postdoc researcher with CE, where she leads applied research in partnership with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma for our Bison Lab to understand the ecological, carbon, and climate-related effects of bison grazing on tribal lands. She holds a PhD. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University.

Dr. Lindsey Smart is a landscape ecologist, professor at North Carolina State University, and a Coastal Scientist with the Nature Conservancy. Her research focuses on the integration of social science methods and ecological processes into models of land-use that are used to explore ecosystem services trade-offs under future scenarios of land-use and sea level rise adaptation strategies. Dr. Smart holds a PhD in Forestry and Environmental Resources from North Carolina State University.

Maureen Eldredge is a partner at Hutchison, Black and Cook, and has deep experience in creating sophisticated ownership structures, working across business needs, real estate law, and business immigration. She also holds an MA in Marine Affairs, and has worked in natural resource policy and regulation. She assists CE in creating the legal entities that allow landowners to participate collectively in markets for climate mitigation and other ecosystem services.

Dr. Melinda Martinez is a wetland ecologist specializing in ecosystem resilience, carbon cycling, and remote sensing. Her research spans a variety of wetland ecosystems, including salt marshes, forested wetlands, and mangroves along the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Everglades, coastal North Carolina, and the Chesapeake Bay. Melinda has a PhD in Forestry and Environmental Resources (Minor in Remote Sensing) from North Carolina State University.

Dr. Richard Griffin is a Professor and Research Scientist of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in the Cooperative Agricultural Research Center at the College of Agricultural, Food, & Natural Resources of Prairie View A&M University. He has over 25 years of teaching experience, with a research focus on wetland soils, soil chemistry, and land-use regulation and control. Dr. Griffin has a PhD. in Pedology and Soil Science from Texas A&M University.

Sarthak Arora is a Machine Learning engineer and researcher, with a specific focus on problems in remote sensing and climate change. He has worked alongside multiple non-profits and universities for diverse challenges in sustainability such as power-plant emissions analysis, site prediction and suitability, wildfire risk assessment, river remediation efforts, disaster relief and aid optimization.

Shelby Bessette is a community and landscape coordinator with Collaborative Earth, where she supports interdisciplinary partnerships that advance habitat restoration, ecological planning, and stewardship initiatives. Drawing on her background in biology and public administration, she works to connect science, policy, and local knowledge to foster resilient landscapes and communities.

Dr. Taylor Ricketts is Gund Professor and Director of the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont as well as a Board Member of CE. Dr. Ricketts’ research is focused on the economic and health benefits provided to people by natural areas. He is a co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, which maps and values these natural benefits. He also led the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Science Program for nine years, and he holds a PhD in Biology from Stanford University.

Vickie Belcher is a graduate of the Master's in Community and Regional Planning program at The University of Texas who focuses on water governance in urban contexts. She completed a Boren fellowship in Bengaluru, India studying community participation in the restoration of the city's historical network of lakes. Prior to her studies, she worked as a program manager in Google Trust & Safety and completed a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil.

Yiling Yin’s background blends environmental policy, advocacy, and on-the-ground climate action. With roots in environmental journalism amplifying community voices, she now focuses on finding meaningful expressions of climate solutions in the voluntary carbon market through the design and development of high-integrity carbon projects.

Sherin Thomas is a software professional with over 12 years of experience in big data, data visualization, and machine learning. She has a strong interest in climate science problems, and has assisted NASA's SpaceML project in building software to process petabytes of satellite imagery to detect phenomena like hurricanes and forest fires. Sherin has extensive experience as a software engineer for major tech companies including Netflix, Lyft, and Slack, and is the Lab Leader for CE’s Aicacia Lab.

Dr. Michelle Liu is a chemical engineer with expertise in computational chemistry of crystalline and microporous materials, as well as a naturalist guide and lab leader for CE. She has worked on applications in catalysis, gas storage for carbon capture, and energy storage, and works to use computational modeling for societally relevant problems in chemical, environmental, and health sciences. She holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Benji Friedman is a web developer focused on front-end engineering and creating clean, modern, and responsive websites that are fast, accessible, and thoughtfully designed. He collaborates with a variery of clients to build intuitive, flexible, and visually crafted sites, and draws on his background in digital and physical art.

Evelin Fonseca is a computer scientist with a foundation in mathematics and programming who is dedicated to leveraging the power of machine learning for positive global impact. As a versatile full-stack AI Developer, she brings hands-on experience in both Artificial Intelligence and the development of web and desktop applications.

Guru Prakash is a Senior Software Engineer at Coefficient with expertise in data engineering and large language models. He has worked in a variety of software development roles with companies like Cloudera and Amazon, and he is a part of CE’s Aicacia Lab.

Krysia Llull is a software developer with experience in machine learning, UI, and frontend development. She brings a particular expertise with data pipeline development and SQL. She holds a professional masters in Machine Learning from the Université de Montréal through Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Dr. Simone Blanco Malerba is a physicist, engineer, and postdoc researcher at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) working in computational neuroscience. His research has applied modeling and machine learning skills to other complex systems, including networks, power grids, and CE’s Aicacia Lab. He holds a PhD in Physics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Vladislav Gerasimov is a software engineer with expertise in numerous programming languages including Java, Kotlin, and Python. He works as a Senior Back End Developer at movingimage and volunteers as a software engineer at multiple environmental non-profits.

Dr. Anthony Acciavatti is the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture, with a secondary appointment in the School of the Environment. He wrote Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, a comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin. Anthony spent years crisscrossing the basin, and designed new instruments to map soils and document the choreography of temporary cities and the periodicity of monsoons. He holds a PhD in the History of Science from Princeton.

Aaron Hirsh is a scientist, writer, and entrepreneur with deep interests in environmental education and ecological regeneration. Aaron’s research has appeared in a variety of journals, including Nature, Science, and PNAS, while his writings have been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Best American series, and FSG. As an entrepreneur, Aaron has been involved in bio- and ed-tech. He was also a founder of The Vermilion Sea Institute and Board Chair for Ecology Project International. He holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford.

Ariel Chamberlain is an Environmental Scientist and Data Analyst passionate about supporting the revitalization of nature and environmental justice. Ariel is committed to leveraging their expertise with geospatial data, scientific research, and systems thinking to help design and implement solutions to our polycrisis. Ariel also advocates for life-long education and inclusive community building.

Claire Gorman Hanly studies the designed integration of sensing technologies with built and natural environments; including recent research into deep learning methods for glacial extent mapping, remote-sensing based classification of arctic wetlands and industrial croplands, and the implications of LLMs for the advancement of soil carbon modeling. Claire’s work holds a strong central theme of creative computer vision approaches applied to climate-oriented problems.

James Smoot is an aquatic ecologist with a doctorate in microbiology. He has 25 peer reviewed publications covering a broad range of microbiological and environmental studies such as periphyton-based water quality monitoring, detritivore mediated carbon transport, and water quality sensor design for the International Space Station.

Trained as both an architect and a landscape architect, Jingyi Wang is currently pursuing her Master of Architecture at Yale and holds a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University, where she graduated with a concentration in socio-cultural landscape studies. Her research and design practice investigates how spatial analysis, ecological modeling, and field-based inquiry can inform interventions in sites of environmental degradation and the spatial inequality it produces.

Markley Boyer began his career in the digital side of the fashion photography business. He now works on conservation visualization projects. He recently created images of Manhattan island in 1609 as it appeared to the first European settlers.

Michael Warner has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics, specializing in Data Science with a focus on sustainability. He is excited about the prospect of doing real-world good by merging his two passions, data and sustainability, together and trying to create the world a healthier environment for all.

Nicole Cao is a Master of Architecture student interested in how built interventions can shape new ways to interact with a changing planet. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, working in architecture offices and research labs in North America and Europe exploring new potentials for climate resilience, the emotional experience of space, and urban food systems.

Nikhil Raj Deep is a researcher who is focused on the use of multiple satellite sensors (Multispectral, Hyperspectral, and Microwave Remote Sensing) and spectroscopy towards developing models for hydrology and vegetation studies. He has worked on ISRO, DST, and DRDO projects that have utilized multi-platform remote sensing data toward terrain, environmental, and natural resource management issues, and he is skilled in ArcGIS Products, QGIS, Google Earth Engine, MATLAB, and R.

Sarah Bergmann works at the intersections of ecology, culture, environmental philosophy, and design. She was the designer and leader of the Pollinator Pathway, a civic project that brought together thousands of participants around a park designed to prioritize density within urban environments and sustain nature beyond city limits. She brings experience in the development of well-designed and researched civic projects, as well as in mobilizing communities around collective design for action.

Sarthak Arora is a Machine Learning engineer and researcher, with a specific focus on problems in remote sensing and climate change. He has worked alongside multiple non-profits and universities for diverse challenges in sustainability such as power-plant emissions analysis, site prediction and suitability, wildfire risk assessment, river remediation efforts, disaster relief and aid optimization, etc.

Siwu (Annie) Ding is a designer and artist working between architecture, drawing, and storytelling. Trained in Graphic Design and Illustration at RISD and now studying Architecture at Yale University, Annie explores how buildings can hold emotions, memories, and care. Through motion graphics, drawings, collages, and posters, she translates spatial ideas into visual narratives using movement and composition to reveal how architecture can breathe, listen, and connect.

Vickie Belcher is a graduate of the Master's in Community and Regional Planning program at The University of Texas who focuses on water governance in urban contexts. She completed a Boren fellowship in Bengaluru, India studying community participation in the restoration of the city's historical network of lakes. Prior to her studies, she worked as a program manager in Google Trust & Safety and completed a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil.