Mustafa Santiago Ali, Hip Hop Caucus
Mustafa Santiago Ali is the Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice & Community Revitalization for the Hip Hop Caucus. The Hip Hop Caucus is a national, non-profit and non-partisan organization that connects the Hip Hop community to the civic process to build power and create positive change. As HHC Senior Vice President, he leads the strategic direction, expansion and operation of the Hip Hop Caucus’ portfolio on Climate, Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization. Mustafa is renowned as a National Speaker, Trainer and Facilitator specializing in Social Justice issues focused on revitalizing our most vulnerable communities. Throughout his career, Mr. Ali has conducted over 1,000 presentations across the country, including speeches, guest lecturers and trainings. He has also worked with over 500 domestic and international communities to secure environmental, health and economic justice. Mustafa Ali joined the Hip Hop Caucus, after working 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he served as the Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice and Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization. Mustafa elevated environmental justice issues and worked across federal agencies to strengthen environmental justice policies, programs and initiatives. At the EPA, Mustafa led the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJIWG), which was comprised of 17 federal agencies and White House offices focused on implementing holistic strategies to address the issues facing vulnerable communities. Mustafa Ali worked for EPA Administrators beginning with William Riley and ending with Scott Pruitt. He joined the EPA as a student and became a founding member of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). Mr. Ali also served as the Director of Communications in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), where he led the Communications and Stakeholder Involvement (CSI) team. In 2012, Mustafa launched the EPA’s Environmental Justice in Action Blog, which reached over 100,000 followers and highlighted innovative actions to address environmental justice, sustainability and climate change issues. In 2010, Mr. Ali also served as the Environmental Justice Lead for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In 2004, he was selected as the EPA’s National Enforcement Training Institutes “Trainer of the Year” for his efforts in training over 4,000 across the country in “The Fundamentals of Environmental Justice.” Mustafa Ali was a Brookings Institution Congressional Fellow in the Office of Congressman John Conyers from 2007 through 2008. He has been a Guest Lecturer at Harvard and Yale University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Spelman College, Albany Law School and Howard University School of Law. Mustafa is a former instructor at West Virginia University and Stanford University in Washington, and the former co-host of the “Spirit in Action” radio show which focused on social justice issues. Mustafa has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, VICE, Democracy NOW. He has also been featured in the Washington Post, GQ Magazine and cited in over 100 publications. |
Nilda Mesa, Columbia University
Mesa has been the Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, where she led OneNYC, the city’s path-breaking long-term sustainability plan, overseeing environmental reviews and citywide policy development and implementation on such areas as energy, climate change, green building standards, recycling and the circular economy, environmental justice, air quality, water, parks and natural resources, and sustainable transportation. |
Julie Pullen, Stevens Institute of Technology
Dr. Pullen is an Associate Professor in Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. She holds a joint appointment with Brookhaven National Laboratory and is an adjunct research scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Previously, she was the Director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Center of Excellence in Maritime Security at Stevens and a former science fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. She studies complex coastal air/sea interactions, those surrounding cities and mountains, utilizing high-resolution (<5 km) coupled ocean/atmosphere/ hydrology models and observations from targeted field campaigns around the globe. Dr. Pullen has served on the steering team for field studies in urban air contaminant dispersion (DHS/Defense Threat Reduction Agency NYC Urban Dispersion Program) and tropical meteorology and oceanography (Office of Naval Research, PhilEx and PISTON programs). Dr. Pullen’s research contributes to the understanding and development of resilience and sustainability in coastal environments, and the enhancement of Earth System Models on weather, subseasonal-to-seasonal, and climate timescales. In 2015 Dr. Pullen was elected as the physical oceanography councilor for The Oceanography Society. She was a member of the 2014-2016 National Research Council committee on Earth System Prediction and is on the international GODAE Coastal Ocean and Shelf Seas Task Team. Dr. Pullen is a board member of the Waterfront Alliance, a civic organization representing over 900 groups with a stake in the NY/NJ waterfront, and is co-chair of the policy committee. She was a chapter co-author of the 2015 New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC2) report. She is currently co-editing an issue of the journal Oceanography focused on ocean warming. Dr. Pullen holds a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Oregon State University. As an undergraduate at Macalester College she majored in physics and math. She was the first undergraduate intern at the Santa Fe Institute, and conducted postdoctoral work with the Naval Research Laboratory pioneering air/sea coupled modeling. |
Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she heads the Climate Impacts Group. She is Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), a body of experts convened by the mayor to advise the city on adaptation for its critical infrastructure. She co-led the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She was a Coordinating Lead Author of Working Group II for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is Co-Director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), Co-Editor of the First and Second UCCRN Assessment Reports on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3), and Co-Chair of the Urban Thematic Group for the United Nations UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Campaign for an Urban Sustainability Development Goal (SDG). She serves as Chair of the Board of the New York City Climate Museum. She was named as one of “Nature’s 10: Ten People Who Mattered in 2012” by the journal Nature, for her work preparing New York City for climate extremes and change. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she joins impact models with climate models to project future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions. She is a Professor at Barnard College and a Senior Research Scientist at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. |
William Solecki, Hunter College - CUNY
Solecki’s research focuses on urban environmental change, resilience, and environmental transitions. He has served as leader or co-leader of several climate impacts studies in the greater New York and New Jersey region, including the New York City on Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) and the New York State ClimAID report. He currently serves as the co-PI on the Climate Change Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) NOAA-funded RISA project which is designed to promote climate risk information for decision-makers and stakeholders in the urban Northeast US. Solecki is the participant on a recently NSF funded, Urban Resilience and Extreme Events (UrEX) Sustainability Research Network. He currently is a coordinating lead author of the IPCC, 1.5°C Special Report, and a lead author on the fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Northeast Chapter. He is a co-founder of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) and co-editor of the recent Climate Change and Cities Assessment (ARC3) Report. He also serves as the co-editor of the journals Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and the Journal of Extreme Events. His Ph.D. is in Geography from Rutgers University. |