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Elizabeth Bojsza is passionate about community engagement, empowering voices, and asking good questions. She has been a faculty member at Stony Brook University for over two decades, where she has taught 25+ distinct courses for graduate and undergraduate students. She is currently a facilitator and curriculum designer for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and finds it incredibly rewarding to apply the skills of analysis and feedback that she honed as a theater artist to designing curricula and facilitating experiential learning for scientists and healthcare professionals. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in theater and trained instructors and teachers in various contexts including non-profit theater and higher education. She is the program director for the Academy of Civic Life, a pre-college program for local high school students to earn college credit learning about democracy and civic engagement. Ms. Bojsza served Suffolk County, NY as a human rights commissioner, and is currently the Vice Chair of the Board for Stony Brook Child Care.

Lydia Jennings, PhD, (she/her) is an environmental soil scientist. Lydia, citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari), earned her BS from California State University, Monterey Bay and completed her PhD at the University of Arizona in the Department of Environmental Sciences, with a minor in American Indian Policy. Her research intersects soil health, environmental data stewardship and science communication. Lydia is a 2014 University of Arizona NIEHS Superfund Program trainee, a 2015 recipient of National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a 2019 American Geophysical Union “Voices for Science” Fellow, a 2020 Native Nations Institute Indigenous Data Sovereignty Fellow, and a 2021 Data Science Fellow. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in Environmental Studies. She is passionate about connecting her scholarship to outdoor spaces through running and increasing representation in outdoor recreation, and was internationally recognized as an “Environmental Sports Champion” by the Lewis Pugh Foundation and as a “Trail Runner Changing the World” by REI.

Amy Sharma, PhD, is the Executive Director of Science for Georgia, a non-profit that bridges the gap between scientists and the public through training, outreach, and advocating for the responsible use of science in public policy. Her career has spanned across industry, academia, and government: working in product management and R&D for big data start-ups and labs, teaching Medical Physics at the University of Western Australia, and managing programs at the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Sharma’s PhD is in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University, and she was a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. She enjoys difficult challenges, jobs with overly long titles, communicating science to non-scientists, performing science stand-up comedy, sewing, and smoking various foods.