Research Projects

SNU In the World Program 2024 Rapporteur Report

Posted on by

SNU In the World Program 2024 Rapporteur Report

Innovation, Science & Justice

University of California, Santa Cruz

January 23, 2024 – February 03, 2024

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) hosted its second year of the SNU in the World Program, with 29 visiting scholars (including Professor Doogab Yi, 2 graduate students, and 26 undergraduates) from Seoul National University (SNU). During their two-week stay, scholars engaged with various projects conducted at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) by SJRC affiliates. The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at SNU, is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train South Korean undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program at UCSC is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs included visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis).

The program was once again facilitated by Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University, who brought together a diverse group of students from fields including the biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, industrial design, pharmacy, dentistry, sociology, anthropology, business administration, and fine arts. Over the two-week program students participated in an in-depth series of lectures, workshops, a film screening and live performance, and field trips to the surrounding Bay Area museums, cultural centers, and sites of innovation such as Google and an AI enabled lab at Stanford University Hospital. Activities focused on exploring cutting-edge issues including stem cell innovation in organoid intelligence, data and information justice, engineering and AI ethics, health equity, land and site-based practices, and ecological reparations.

Crown College Provost Manel Camps provided the students with an introduction to initiatives in innovation at UC Santa Cruz.  These included the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED), which promotes the development, research, and teaching of innovation and entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz, the Innovation and Business Engagement Hub, and with the Student Creativity Empowerment and Entrepreneurship association (SCEE). SJRC co-directors Jenny Reardon and James Doucet-Battle then took the lead framing the key learning outcomes of the visit centering on pressing topics of bioethics, health disparities, and equitable research. Previous and current projects affiliated with SJRC such as the the Leadership in Ethical & Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research Project and the University of California – Historically Black Colleges and Universities (UC-HBCU) Initiative provided insights into the Center’s efforts to center issues of equity and justice in science and engineering. 

This year’s SNU in the World program provided an opportunity to bring together a diverse community of researchers, scholars, artists, and policy makers who work in the domain of Science and Justice at UCSC and in the broader Bay Area. On their first day, they had a chance to be in conversation with Tiffany Wise-West, the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for The City of Santa Cruz and a founding graduate fellow of the Science & Justice Training Program. In this conversation they learned about innovative relationships, environmental justice and the city.

Over dinner that first evening, they met with undergraduate student fellows in the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change. The Everett Program develops young leaders who use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, empowering people to develop practical solutions to persistent problems.

Over the following days, students had a chance to engage with a variety of areas and topics. In a session with the UCSC IBSC Stem Cell Journal Club, the visitors engaged in rich conversation surrounding bioethical questions raised by the innovative biotechnological research in organoid intelligence. UCSC Professor of History Ben Breene and Roya Pakzad, Founder and Director of Taraaz, a non-profit organization working at the intersection of technology and human rights, raised the question of ethical dilemmas in engineering from a global historical perspective, while two faculty members in the History of Consciousness department, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, approached the question of ecological justice from the framework of community technoscience. Leilani Gilpin and Carolina Flores, Assistant Professors in Computer Science and Engineering and Philosophy respectively, presented their collaborative work on the topic of justice in data science. Chessa Adsit-Morris and James Karabin, graduate researchers in SJRC’s Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) Initiative, also focused on addressing issues of equity at intellectual and institutional levels in science and engineering.

This year, a series of performances, exhibitions, and film screenings complemented core themes of the lectures. A live performance of Strata: A Performance of Topography, an improvisational documentary meditating on land-based histories, shared thematic resonances with Connie Zheng and Kevin Corcoran’s lecture on land and site-based artistic research practices. Another highlight of the artistic contributions of the program was a screening of Richland, the 2023 documentary film by filmmaker Irene Lusztig centering on the residents and nuclear site workers of Hanford, a manufacturing company of weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project in the town Richland, Washington. The collective viewing of the film was effective in bringing about cross-cultural exchange of significant social, political, and national differences about world historical events such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The visitors’ responses to the film showed how the technology of nuclear bombs signifying American imperialism could also be framed as an anti-colonial technology in Korea. Both perspectives raise difficult questions about the role of normalized ideologies in justifying immense violence. 

Outside of UCSC, the group participated in several field trips throughout the local Bay Area. They were welcomed to the UC San Francisco Mission Bay Campus by Julie Harris-Wai, an Associate Professor at UCSF’s Institute for Health and Aging in the School of Nursing. Visitors embarked on a walking tour of Third Street led by Reardon and researcher Dennis Browe as part of SJRC’s Just Biomedicine project. Just Biomedicine is a research collective that critically examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The walking tour was designed to allow participants to think critically about who and what research infrastructures (such as buildings) are for when confronted by accessibility, surveillance, and social stratification issues in the urban landscape. Visitors also had ample free time to explore the city by attending de Young Museum, SF MOMA, and biking the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito before visiting Paul Tang’s AI enabled Lab at Stanford Hospital and touring UC Berkeley. 

After traveling back to Santa Cruz, SNU students worked in groups to synthesize their lessons throughout the two-week program into conference-style presentations. During the project development phase, groups discussed and debated a number of issues. At the end of the two-week program, teams presented their final research projects covering topics including: the role of artificial intelligence in mental health sciences; access to medical care and the power of walking ethnographies. All of these projects attempted to apply and analyze practical approaches to addressing issues of equity and justice in the realms of science and technology.

To take part in or contribute to this partnership for the next visit in late January 2025, please contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

2024 SNU Visiting Students

Posted on by

Graduate Researchers

ByeongWoong Minin

Ethan

Undergraduate Researchers

Group 1:

Jaehoon Jeong 

Giyun Choi is a junior majoring in Chemical&Biological Engineering at Seoul National University. He is especially interested in Energy process system engineering. So he plans to learn more about process control, optimization and modeling.

Yoon Lee is a junior studying Sociology and Science and Technology Studies at Seoul National University. He is interested in how diverse “situated knowledges” are constructed in societies. In particular, he finds it fun how heterogenous actors entangle and understand each other within medical practices. Also, he is recently getting into AI as a new important actor producing scientific knowledge.

Eunhye Kim is a senior student majoring in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering. She has a keen interest in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ergonomics. Previously, she participated in a project designing a human-machine interface for semi-autonomous vehicles. Currently, she is conducting research in HCI, aiming to help users bridge the gap between text and image data in the fashion domain. Apart from academics, she enjoys jogging, swimming, and visiting art galleries.

Che Young Yoon is a junior at Seoul National University. She belongs to the College of Liberal Studies and is majoring in psychology and business administration. She has been interested in law since young, so she wanted to go to law school, but recently, she became interested in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. By combining law and neuroscience, she wants to create innovations that use psychological mechanisms to determine whether statements are true in court. She is interested in grasping people’s habits based on psychological knowledge and applying them to the field of law, beyond simply judging the authenticity of statements.

Group 2:

Seung Seok Oh is a senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University. Having strong belief in a word “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” by Arthur C. Clark, I am deeply fascinated by engineering, especially robotics and aerospace. I am also interested in Silicon Valley startups that are rapidly changing the face of the world.

Hangyeol Go

Nayeon Joh

Minjae Kim is a junior majoring in Pharmacy at Seoul National University. She is very interested in pharmaceutical industry and medical health system. So she wants to learn more about new drug development and research issues that pharmaceutical companies focusing on. Also she wants to know about policies and systems that can help more people become healthy.

Chaehyeon Kim is junior majoring in economics and Management of Technology and recently taking a year off to do an internship at AI startup as a developer. She is interested in the dynamics between technology and society, and especially how the start-up companies change the everyday life of people. Throughout the internship experience, she became concerned with the social structural solution of the situations that start-up companies face but which are difficult to manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps

Group 3:

Dong Uk Kim is a junior at Seoul National University, is majoring in Nuclear Engineering, with a keen focus on materials science within this field. He actively explores innovative nuclear plant designs and the critical materials required for their construction. He is also interested in assessing the role of nuclear energy in ethical and policy aspect, particularly as it relates to the global transition towards a low-carbon future.

JunHyeok Park

Nahyun Kim is a junior majoring in Painting at the Collage of Fine Arts and Anthropology at the Collage of Social Science. I am interested in how our visual culture has influenced our identity. In particular, I am interested in the methodology that Japan adopted after World War II to explain its own visual culture as ‘Japan’s uniqueness’ by separating it from Western influences, and the dangers of the linear historical perspective it entails. In relation to this program, I want to take a closer look at the potential social alienation that various revolutions in science and technology might bring about. By doing so, I aim to explore the possibility of caring for more microscopic extras by the area of art, rather than focusing on macroscopic transformations.

Yeongseo Shin is a junior majoring in college of Pharmacy at Seoul National University. I am very interested in science that considers society. I would like to ask how the U.S. viewed and responded to the reality of the medical gap, especially in the ‘health disparity’ class. I am also curious about the level of personalized medical care and the status of social institutions in the United States. Also, I wonder development of social, legal and ethical discussion about new technology innovation. I’m looking forward to getting diverse experiences and insights through this program!

Yoonwon Lee is a freshman majoring in Business at Seoul National University.

Group 4:

Hyeokjung Choi is a junior majoring in Business Administration at Seoul National University. He is deeply passionate about the innovation and productivity that flourish within a free and dynamic market, and hopes to provide a stable foundation for it. Currently, his field of interest is the appropriate valuation of technological innovations and IPOs of related start-ups, which accompanies due diligence. Also, he is interested in various topics of finance including financial crisis and its relation with governmental activities.

Kyunghoon Han is a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering. I’m interested in AI technology and robotics. I’m planning to study and research some wearable devices. Through this snu-in program, I want to discuss social problems related to science technology like AI. Also, it will be a great time to share idea about science issue like CES2024 while touring companies in silicon valley.

Jwa Yewon is a freshman majoring in Medicine at Seoul National University. I think that future innovations such as genetic motification may impact on social inequility if we use these not properly, so i am interested in the way that we take advantage of innovations wisely and i want to shate various ideas with you !

Minyoung Shin is a biology major, and the reason I love biology is because the more I learn, the more I understand about human beings and life. It fascinates me that we can use the scientific method to find answers to questions like “Who am I? How does my body and mind work?” So I’m particularly interested in genetics, which explains the origins of humanity and our innate dispositions, and neuroscience, which allows us to understand human thoughts and emotions as electrochemical interactions. I’m also very interested in STS, which studies the relationship between science, people, and society. This semester, I took some courses that allowed me to broaden my horizons by discussing issues related to science and technology from a social and philosophical perspective. I hope to gain a variety of experiences at SNU in San Francisco to further refine my interests.

Seeun Lee is a junior majoring in Food Biotechnology at Seoul National University. I have a lot of interest in “Decarbonization of the Food Industry”. Furthermore, I wish to learn about the recent researches going on and values that IT giants are pursuing in the biomedical field. 

Group 5:

Junwoo Kim is a sophomore majoring in business administration at College of Liberal Studies of Seoul National University. He’s also considering to major in architecture or design his own Student Designed Major combining architecture, sociology and anthropology. His interests can divided in two ways; interest in start-ups as a job, and personal interest in architecture or urban sociology especially how people and any buildings, cities, places, or any ‘spaces’ interact with each other. Also it has been always most interesting part for him that how companies make innovation and change the world.

Seunghoon Oh is a junior majoring in Biological Sciences at Seoul National University. He is especially interested in fields including structural biology, biochemistry and biophysics. He aims to develop a novel process for drug discovery through biophysical research, and eventually improve the affordability of personalized medicine.

Wonjae Shin is a sophomore majoring in Energy Resources Engineering at Seoul National University. He is interested in various fields surrounding energy and resources, such as GIS, energy markets, and petroleum. In particular, he is interested in the distribution of energy based on economics.

Younjin Kang is a junior majoring in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, and double majoring in Computer Science Engineering. While studying artificial intelligence, she became interested in robotics and continues to study this field. Beyond technical expertise, she is passionate about understanding the social context and ethical responsibilities that accompany engineering applications.

Chaemi Song is a junior majoring in Business Administration and double majoring in Computer Science. Her academic journey is characterized by a profound interest not only in the technical aspects of artificial intelligence but also in the broader context that has shaped its evolution.  She is particularly fascinated by the interplay between technological advancements and their societal impacts, especially in the realm of AI. She aims to acquire a nuanced perspective on AI that encompasses both its technological potential and its transformative role in shaping the future of human society.

Daeun Kim is a freshman majoring in Dentistry at Seoul National University School of Dentistry. While taking a Global Citizenship Education(GCED) course, she became conscious about global inequity in access to oral health care. She seeks applicable model for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) especially on oral health care. 

SNU In the World Program 2023 Rapporteur Report

Posted on by

SNU In the World Program 2023 Rapporteur Report

Innovation, Science & Justice

University of California, Santa Cruz

January 29, 2023 – February 11, 2023

Over a two-week period in early 2023, the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) hosted 27 visiting scholars (including Professor Doogab Yi, 4 graduate students, and 22 undergraduates) from Seoul National University (SNU) as part of the SNU in the World Program to learn about the work being done at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) by SJRC affiliates. The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at SNU, is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train South Korean undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program at UCSC is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs included visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis).

The program was facilitated by Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University, who brought together a diverse group of students from fields including the biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, industrial design, philosophy, sociology, english, business administration, and fashion design. Over the two-week program students participated in an in-depth series of lectures, workshops, reading groups, and field trips focused on exploring some of today’s most pressing issues including biomedical innovation, environmental justice, climate change, health equity, and toxic ecologies. Students were also able to participate in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” by attending Kaushik Sunder Rajar’s lecture “Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research.”

With the SJRC, SNU visiting scholars learned about a few of the projects and initiatives SJRC co-directors Jenny Reardon and James Doucet-Battle are working on, including an initiative by the University of California with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (UC-HBCU) a partnership with North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University aimed at improving diversity in UC doctoral biology programs, as well as the Leadership in Ethical & Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research Project. Both projects are aimed at increasing diversity within STEM research and addressing issues of equity at the intellectual and institutional level in order to secure more just and equitable forms of science and engineering. The group also met with SJRC affiliates and student fellows in the UCSC Sustainability Office, the UCSC Genomics Institute, and joined for a session of the UCSC IBSC Stem Cell Journal Club. In these sessions, they explored issues ranging from bioethical questions raised by innovative biotechnologies like stem cells, to human rights issues raised by technologies of war.

The group participated in several field trips throughout the local Bay Area including visiting with Dongoh Park, Senior Policy Advisor for Google’s Global Trust and Safety Team on the Google campus in Silicon Valley. The group also visited the UC San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center at Mission Bay to learn about the cutting edge research and clinical treatment innovations there as well as the justice issues raised by the building of the Google campus. A highlight of the field trip was a lecture by Fred Turner, Professor of Communication at Stanford University who also serves on the SJRC Advisory Board. Professor Turner’s talk, “Cultures of Innovation,” drew on research from his award winning book From Counterculture to Cyberculture and explored how culture creates ideological models for the reimagination of technology. Turner showed how the 1960s counterculture movement influenced the emergence of cyberculture. Both are predicated on technology as a tool for personal transformation, and labor as a tool for personal growth.

While in San Francisco students participated in a walking tour of Third Street as part of the SJRC’s Just Biomedicine project. Just Biomedicine is a SJRC research collective that critically examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The walking tour was designed to allow participants to view how technoscientific transformations can build into cityscapes new inequalities and injustices (i.e., new challenges to democratic governance; new surveillance regimes; and new forms of social stratification). The walking tour allowed participants to experience the stratified health and wealth outcomes of the push towards biomedical innovation in San Francisco.

The SNU students worked in groups throughout the two-week program to explore various issues of interest and develop a group project. During the project development phase, groups discussed and debated a number of issues, including: broadening definitions of diversity and inclusion; reconceiving relationships between science and justice; and understanding the role of histories of injustices in current regimes of conducting and governing technoscience.

“Diversity is an open attitude that understands and respects various individuals and groups and does not exclude unjustly.”  

From the presentation, “Diversity: Aligning the Ideal with the Practical,” by Min Joo Lee, Hyeon Beom Choi, Su Hyun Hur, & Yi Ji Kim.

At the end of the two-week program, project teams presented their final group research projects. Final projects covered topics including: 

  • how historical cases of injustice and discrimination have led to mistrust of the contemporary healthcare system; (Link)
  • the need to address both ethical and practical aspects of diversity through the development of policies and incentives to enhance diversity; (Link)
  • how the theoretical concept of slow science can be applied through an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) model; (Link)
  • what environmental justice issues vulnerable populations in Korea are currently facing; and (Link)
  • how the drive towards innovation has historically resulted in exploitation, inequity, and discrimination highlighting the new for “Just Innovation.” (Link)

All of these projects attempted to apply and analyze practical approaches to addressing issues of equity and justice in the realms of science and technology.

If you are interested in presenting or meeting with SNU in late January 2024 or late January 2025, please contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

Photos:

Students during a lecture.

Image 1: Group lecture in the Oakes College Mural Room with Tiffany Wise-West, Sustainability and Climate Action Manager, City of Santa Cruz. Photo by Jenny Reardon.

Professor Jenny Reardon (UCSC) and Professor Doogab Yi (SNU) smiling at camera.

Image 2: Professor Jenny Reardon (UCSC) and Professor Doogab Yi (SNU). Photo by Colleen Stone.

The Joan and Sanford Weill Neurosciences Building.

Image 3: Third Street Walking Tour, San Francisco. Photo by Dennis Browe or Jenny Reardon in front of the Joan and Sanford Weill Neurosciences Building.

Jun Kim, Jeongin Baek, Hyeonyeong Lee, and Geon Jeremiah Heo presenting.

Image 4: Presentation by Jun Kim, Jeongin Baek, Hyeonyeong Lee, and Geon Jeremiah Heo on February 9th, 2023. Image by Jenny Reardon.

Professor Jenny Reardon presenting a lecture on the ethics of biotechnology to the UCSC IBSC Stem Cell Journal Club and SNU visitors.

Image 5: Professor Jenny Reardon presenting a lecture on the ethics of biotechnology to the UCSC IBSC Stem Cell Journal Club and SNU visitors. Image by Chessa Adsit-Morris.

May 31-June 01, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Juan Sebastian Gil-Riaño on Stolen Evidence: Indigenous Children and Bio-historical narratives of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War

Posted on by

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

12:15-1:30 PM 

Humanities 1, Room 210

 

Thursday, June 01, 2023

12:15-1:45 PM 

Humanities 1, 210

On Wednesday, May 31 at 12:15pm in Humanities 1, rm. 210, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Juan Sebastian Gil Riaño, will present on “Stolen Evidence: Indigenous Children and Bio-historical narratives of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War.” 

This talk examines how anthropologists and human biologists used abducted Indigenous children in South America as sources of evidence for a variety of bio-historical research projects during the Cold War. From 1930 to 1970, human scientists studying the Aché — a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group in Paraguay — used evidence derived from measuring, bleeding, and observing children in the service of research projects concerned with reconstructing global human migrations in the Western hemisphere. Through studies of Aché children and families, scientists like the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard, the U.S. human geneticist Carleton Gajdusek, and the French structural anthropologists Pierre and Helen Clastres discerned ancient patterns of migration by considering the diffusion of cultural and linguistic traits, the process of genetic drift in populations, and the immunological effects of European conquest. Yet many of the Aché children used in these studies had been abducted and sold as servants to neighboring ranchers. By highlighting the use of stolen Indigenous children as research objects in Cold War human diversity research, my talk uncovers the enduring and violent colonial structures that made this knowledge possible as well as the ethical and legal protocols and forms of Indigenous resistance that emerged in response.

Then, on Thursday, June 01 at 12:15pm in Humanities 1, rm. 210, Dr. Gil Riaño will lead a reading group on “Indigenous Health and Infrastructures of Race.” Both activities will be in-person only.

In the past few decades, biomedical researchers and human biologists have called for more ethical guidelines for conducting fieldwork on Indigenous groups in South America. Included among these proposals is a call for greater “epidemiological surveillance” of remote Indigenous groups with the aim of reducing health disparities. This bioethical concern is driven by an understanding of colonial history, which presumes that without biomedical intervention Indigenous groups inevitably succumb to European diseases upon contact. In this reading group, we will explore how such bioethical narratives are themselves a product of a deep-seated colonial project that Daniel Nemser has called “the Infrastructures of Race.”

Juan Sebastian Gil Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. 

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

May 10-11, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Anna Barry-Jester on “From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America”

Posted on by

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

6:00 – 8:00 pm 

Humanities 1, Room 210

Thursday, May 11, 2023

12:15 – 1:45 pm

Humanities 1, Room 210

On Wednesday, May 10 at 6:00 pm, we will host a talk entitled, “From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America” with Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Anna Barry-Jester. Then, on Thursday, May 11th at 12:15 a reading group.

What does it mean to construct a “cause” of disease? What is the primary source material we consult as we write the narrative of a new disease? When it comes to public health, how do we fairly and accurately reflect scientific evidence, personal experience, and community knowledge? In this talk, journalist Anna Maria Barry-Jester will use these questions to chart the history of a particular epidemic of chronic kidney disease that, since the early aughts, has been recognized as a leading cause of death in parts of Central America. In the two decades that followed, the global understanding of this condition has expanded to a growing list of communities, including war-torn parts of Sri Lanka, agrarian sectors of India and migrant guest workers from Nepal. Drawing from nearly 20 years of reporting — including interviews, photography, video, and scientific literature — Barry-Jester will explore the shifting narratives of the emergence of a disease and interrogate what becomes evidence and how it informs public understanding of disease and its causes.

Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News. More information can be found on her website.

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

April 19, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Karina L. Walters on Transcending Historical Trauma: How to Address American Indian Health Inequities and Promote Thriving

Posted on by

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

6:00 – 7:30 pm

Cowell Ranch Hay Barn (free and open to the public, register)

Thursday, April 20, 2023

12:00 – 1:30 pm

Humanities 1, room 210

SAVE-the-DATEs! On Wednesday, April 19 at 6:00 pm, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Karina L. Walters, will present a campus-wide talk at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. It is free and open to the public, though we do ask people to pre-register. Then, on Thursday, April 20, we will host a reading group at 12:00pm in Humanities 1, room 210.

Throughout history, settler colonialism has endeavored to erase the lived experiences and histories of American Indian and Alaska Native Peoples. Yet, Indigenous populations, particularly Indigenous women, remain strong and resilient pillars of communities. Oftentimes these [her]stories are missed in public health initiatives as a result of settler colonialism’s perpetual drive to erase and silence. In this talk, Dr. Walters will explore the latest advances in designing culturally derived, Indigenist health promotion interventions among American Indian and Alaska Native women. The talk will describe the indigenist methodological innovations utilized in the NIH funded Yappalli Choctaw Road to Health, a culturally focused, land-based obesity and substance abuse prevention program as well as the national multi-site Honor Project Two-Spirit Health Study. Consistent with tribal systems of knowledge, both studies illustrate the importance of developing culturally derived health promotion interventions rooted in Indigenist thoughtways and land-based practices to promote Indigenous thrivance and community well-being.

Dr. Karina L. Walters (MSW, PhD) is the recently appointed Director of the Tribal Health Research Office at the National Institute of Health. She is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a Katherine Hall Chambers University Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, and Co-Director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI) at the University of Washington. Dr. Walters is world renowned for her expertise in developing behavioral and multi-level health interventions steeped in culture to activate health-promoting behaviors. She has written landmark papers on traumatic stress and health, historical and intergenerational trauma, and originated the Indigenist Stress-Coping model. She has led 22 NIH-funded studies, is one of the leading American Indian scientists in the country, and is only one of two American Indians (and the only Native woman) ever invited to deliver the prestigious Director’s lecture to the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) at the NIH. She is the first American Indian Fellow inductee into the American Academy of Social Welfare and Social Work (AASWSW).

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

March 7-8, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Wangui Muigai on Fighting for Life: Race and the Limits of Infant Survival

Posted on by

Tuesday, March 07, 2023

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

University Center

 

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Humanities 1, 210

On Tuesday, March 7 at 5:00pm at the University Center, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Wangui Muigai, will present a talk titled, “Fighting for Life: Race and the Limits of Infant Survival.” Then, on Wednesday, March 8, we will host a reading group with Muigai at 4:00pm. Both activities will be in-person only.

Join Dr. Wangui Muigai as she charts the history of one of the most enduring health disparities in America, the racial gap in infant survival. Drawing on a trove of historical records and archival materials, this talk follows Black families as they have journeyed from birthing rooms to burial grounds, fighting for the ability to birth and nurture healthy babies. In charting the historical landscapes of Black infant death across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dr. Muigai will examine the role of cultural practices, medical theories, and communal initiatives to explain and address the causes of Black infant death. The talk considers the legacy of these ideas and efforts in ongoing struggles to preserve Black life.

Wangui Muigai is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in the departments of History, African & African American Studies and the Health: Science, Society, and Policy Program. Dr. Muigai was named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and selected as a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. Her first book, on the history of infant death in the Black experience, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

CellPress logo

Published in CellPress: Trustworthiness matters: Building equitable and ethical science

Posted on by

A new CellPress publication, “Trustworthiness matters: Building equitable and ethical science,” is out by Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon, founding director of the Science & Justice Research Center and collaborators Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Columbia), Sara Goering (University of Washington, Seattle), Stephanie M. Fullerton (University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle), Mildred K. Cho (Stanford), Aaron Panofsky (UC Los Angeles), and Evelynn M. Hammonds (Harvard, Spelman) on their collaborative project LEED. LEED seeks to establish ethics and equity best practices for emerging forms of science and technology.

The article can also be accessed at Science Direct.

Learn more about LEED in this campus news article and on the project webpage.

January 27, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Kaushik Sunder Rajan on Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research

Posted on by

Friday, January 27, 2023

12:15 pm – 1:30 pm

Humanities 1, 210

 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Humanities 1, 210

SAVE-the-DATEs! On Friday, January 27 at 12:15pm, we will host a reading group with Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, in Humanities 1, 210. Then, on Wednesday, February 1, Rajan will present a talk titled, “Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research,” at 4:00pm.

This talk is the presentation of an emergent research trajectory. Drawing upon an imaginary of “multisituated” research design and practice, I elaborate the (often contingent and serendipitous) development of my recent work in South Africa, which includes a research project on health and constitutionalism and a teaching- and performance-based collaboration on the politics of breath. I am still wrestling with how to structure both, how they come together and diverge, their different conceptual modalities and political stakes. This includes a consideration of the stakes of legal archival research and life-history interviews in the context of contemporary and emergent research and political situations, as well as of thinking questions of ethnographic form in concert with others who are invested in considerations of literary or musical form. How to think about transformations of research practice in the context of unsettled and unresolved macro-political transformations in uncertain and fragile times? Why might it matter?

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at University of Chicago.

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

SNU in the World Winter 2023 Participant Bios

Posted on by

ABOUT The SNU in the World Program Director

Doogab Yi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science Studies at Seoul National University and Director of The SNU in the World Program with SJRC at UCSC on Innovation, Science and Justice (Winter 2023, 2024, 2025). His broad research interests lay in the intersection between science and capitalism in the 20th and 21th centuries, and he is currently working on several projects related to the development of science and technology within the context of capitalism, such as the history of biotechnology, the relationship between science and the law, and the emergence of the technologies of the 24/7 self. He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science and the law, and environmental history. Learn more at: https://doogab.wixsite.com/doogabyi

ABOUT UCSC PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetical order)

CHESSA ADSIT-MORRIS is a Graduate Student in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Chessa is a curriculum theorist, assistant director of the Center for Creative Ecologies housed within the department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC  Santa Cruz, and the Graduate Student Researcher for the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC). She writes widely on the intersection of curriculum studies, posthumanism(s), ecological thought and SF, and is the author of “Restorying Environmental Education: Figurations, Fictions, Feral Subjectivities” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) (open access copy). Her current teaching, research and publications focus on transdisciplinary research and pedagogy, with particular reference to visual studies, socially engaged art, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, ecological thought and speculative fiction. Chessa works with SJRC specifically on the Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research initiative.

CHRIS BENNER is a Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies and the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz. He currently directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Institute for Social Transformation. His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment. He has authored or co-authored seven books (most recently Solidarity Economics, 2021, Polity Press) and more that 75 journal articles, chapters and research reports. He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

DENNIS BROWE is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dennis’ work lies at the intersections of medical sociology, science & technology studies (STS), public health, sexuality and gender studies, and feminist theory.

ANILA DAULATZAI is a political and medical anthropologist. She has taught in prisons, and in universities across three continents. Her past and current research projects look at widowhood, heroin use, and polio through the lens of serial war and US Empire in Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  She has published articles in Jadaliyya, Al-Jazeera,  several academic journals, and edited volumes and is a contributing member to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, since 2014. She is currently completing her book manuscript provisionally titled War and What Remains. Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan. At UCSC, Anila is a postdoctoral fellow in the history department working on the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine,” a project co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon. More information can be found at: https://raceempirebiomedicine.sites.ucsc.edu/.

JAMES DOUCET-BATTLE is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. James is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. James applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities. James is currently SJRC’s Director of Teaching who oversees the Science & Justice Training Program.

CAMILLA FORSBERG is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. The Forsberg lab focuses on stem cell fate decisions of the blood system. Hematopoietic stem cells are responsible for generating a life-long supply of mature blood cells. Each stem cell is capable of making all of the mature blood cell types with widely different functions: some blood cells specialize in carrying oxygen, others fight off infections, and still others prevent bleeding in the process of blood clotting. How does a stem cell decide which cell type to give rise to? Are these decisions made by the stem cell itself, by its descendant multipotent progenitors, or both? How are these decisions dysregulated to cause cancer and other disorders? We tackle these questions from multiple angles – by in vivo and in vitro experimental approaches, by focusing on specific molecules as well as analyzing global changes. Ultimately, we want to understand the molecular determinants of hematopoietic stem cell fate decisions so that we can prevent and treat both genetic and acquired disorders of the hematopoietic system, including anemia, autoimmune disease, leukemias and lymphomas.

ANNA FRIZ is an Associate Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Anna creates media art, sound and transmission art, working across platforms to present installations, broadcasts, films and performances. Her works reflect upon media ecologies, land use, infrastructures, time perception, and critical fictions. 

LINDSAY HINCK is a Professor of Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology at UC Santa Cruz. The Hinck lab is interested in understanding how epithelial cells assemble into organs during development, and how the reverse process occurs during cancer when cells disassemble and metastasize to inappropriate locations. Recently, we have been focusing our studies on a family of positional cues, called Slits, which were originally identified in the nervous system where they direct the construction of elaborate networks of neuronal connections. Currently, the laboratory has projects in three areas: building an organ; stem cells and self-renewal; and loss of growth control and cancer.

CHRISTINE HONG is an Associate Professor of Literature and is the current chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. Christine’s book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, Christine co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. Christine serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and co-edit the Critical Ethnic Studies journal with Neda Atanasoski. Christine also co-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.” Christine specializes in transnational Asian American, critical Korean, U.S. war and empire, and comparative ethnic studies.

YOUNGEUN KIM is a graduate student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. YoungEun works on sound studies, diaspora studies, ethnomusicology, decolonial studies, audio technology, and ethnographic research.

KAREN MIGA is an Assistant Professor in the Biomolecular Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz and Associate Director at the UCSC Genomics Institute. Karen is the co-lead of the telomere-to-telomere (T2T) consortium and the project director of the human pangenome reference consortium (HPRC) production center at UCSC. Karen’s research program combines innovative computational and experimental approaches to produce the high-resolution sequence maps of human centromeric and pericentromeric DNAs. The Miga lab aims to uncover a new source of genetic and epigenetic variation in the human population, which is useful to investigate novel associations between genotype and phenotype of inherited traits and disease. More information can be found at: https://migalab.com/ 

TAMARA PICO is an Assistant Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The Pico Group’s goal is to better understand past ice sheets and their stability. The Pico group uses ice sheet- solid Earth interactions as a lens to improve ice sheet and sea-level reconstructions on glacial timescales. By leveraging unconventional sea-level datasets, including ancient landscapes, we aim to target knowledge gaps on ice sheet growth and decay.

JENNY REARDON is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Humboldt Foundation, the London School of Economics, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and the United States Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

JEREMY SANFORD is a Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. The Sanford Lab’s goal is to illuminate post-transcriptional networks coordinated by RNA binding proteins. To achieve this they employ genomic, biochemical and computational methods to identify cis-acting RNA elements recognized by a complete family of phylogenetically conserved, essential RNA binding proteins in a comprehensive manner.

DOROTHY R. SANTOS is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Dorothy is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. 

COLLEEN STONE manages all public relations and administrative aspects of the Science & Justice Research Center, its projects and grants, curriculum, training and visitor programs. Additionally, Colleen is the department assistant for Sociology, supporting faculty and student driven research.

ABOUT UCSC Programs and Research Initiatives (in alphabetical order)

The UCSC Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.) is a collaborative effort between Science & Justice and Professors Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) and Michael Stone (Chemistry) to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies for rare diseases by exploiting the chemical language of ribonucleic acid (RNA), while addressing the questions of ethics and justice raised by this novel area of research. Learn more in undergraduate Aisha Lakshman’s (Sociology, Statistics) blog post on “Normalizing Slow Science,” in which she drew on work with C.O.A.S.T. and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. Using her two disciplines to interpret datasets to demonstrate social problems and catalyze social change, Lakshman has since expanded her post to a senior thesis, receiving honors, on “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science.“

The Everett Program for Technology and Social Change (video) develops young leaders who use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, empowering people to develop practical solutions to persistent problems. Everett’s educational philosophy is rooted in a holistic approach that engages students in linking theory, practice and personal development. Students are supported in making these connections through hands-on work contributing to social justice and environmental sustainability with community partners. Students work towards obtaining a major concentration or minor in Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES) administered through the Department of Sociology. Meet the Fellows. 

The Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” is a project co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon. More information can be found at: https://raceempirebiomedicine.sites.ucsc.edu/.

SJRC’s LEED Initiative—a national and international collaboration—aims to clarify, review, and revitalize the roles and value of engaging bioethicists and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts in STEM research. More information can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/research/projects/leed/ 

The Stem Cell Journal Club is hosted by The Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) at UC Santa Cruz which aims to support and advance stem cell research by promoting interdisciplinary discoveries in biology, engineering, and information science. More information is here about the Stem cell agency (CIRM) that funds research training programs at UC Santa Cruz with IBSC and SJRC.

The UCSC SUSTAINABILITY OFFICE strives to foster a culture of diverse, equitable and inclusive sustainability at UC Santa Cruz. They actively engage students, staff, faculty and community members through education, leadership development, institutional change and behavioral transformation. They build partnerships with students and community members to improve UCSC’s environmental performance, seeking to model the way for how large institutions can work collaboratively to solve some of the world’s biggest environmental and social justice challenges. Students also work to advance inclusive sustainability and are leading our efforts at advancing education around the intersectionality between social and environmental justice. Read more about the effort toward the full decarbonization and electrification of the campus in this campus news article.

ABOUT NonUCSC PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetical order)

JULIE HARRIS-WAI is Associate Professor, Institute for Health & Aging in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Harris-Wai’s research focuses on examining the social and ethical factors influencing how and why genomic technologies are translated from the research setting into clinical care and the impact these technologies have on health disparities and underserved communities. The goal of her work is to identify methods for incorporating community and stakeholder perspectives into policy decision-making to improve the appropriate translation of research into clinical and public health programs. Dr. Harris-Wai is the Associate Director of the Kaiser Permanente/UCSF Center for Excellence in Research on Translational Genomics and Ethics (CT2G). She is currently working on an R21 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to use deliberative community engagement methods to inform policy decisions about the future of California’s Newborn Screening Program.

DONGOH PARK is a Senior Policy Advisor at Google’s Trust and Safety Team, where he is responsible for creating and overseeing policies for Chrome Browser and the web ecosystem to protect user safety and privacy. Prior to joining Google six years ago, Dongoh worked as a policy researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute in Korea and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. He also served as an information and communication officer in the Republic of Korea Navy. Dongoh holds a Ph.D. in Social Informatics from Indiana University, Bloomington and currently lives in the Los Angeles area with his family.

KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN is Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Dr. Rajan’s work lies at the intersection of Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with commitments to social theories of capitalism and postcolonial studies. Dr. Rajan’s presentation is part of a presentation to campus through the Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon.

FRED TURNER is a Professor of Communication at Stanford University and serves on the SJRC Advisory Board. Fred is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

TIFFANY WISE-WEST is the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for The City of Santa Cruz and a founding graduate fellow of the Science & Justice Training Program at UC Santa Cruz. Tiffany is a licensed professional civil engineer with nearly 20 years of experience in municipal infrastructure planning, design and project management. Tiffany received her BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Purdue University and specialized in water, wastewater and solid waste systems for the first half of her career. In the second half of her career, after a stint teaching mathematics and environmental education to secondary students, Tiffany earned her MA and PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz where she focused her academic research on the techno-economic and policy elements of sustainability, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and issues at the water and energy nexus. Tiffany specializes in negotiating and managing public-private-academic partnership projects aimed at advancing green infrastructure, policy and programming. She leads the award-winning Santa Cruz GreenWharf initiative and currently works on state and regional climate and energy issues in her roles as Senior Environmental Engineer at EcoShift Consulting, the City of Santa Cruz’s Climate Action Outreach Coordinator, and the District 2 Commissioner on the Santa Cruz County Commission on the Environment.