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Category: Speakers

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Christine McCoy

Christine McCoy is a solid waste and recycling professional who has worked for the public, private, and nonprofit sectors of the industry, focusing on reuse, waste prevention, recycling composting, and energy-from-waste. Ms. McCoy became interested in solid waste during a stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Commonwealth of Dominica, a small island in the Caribbean. Upon her return to the U.S., Christine obtained a M.A. in Cultural and Environmental Geography from Louisiana State University, where she focused on sustainable solid waste management on small islands of the Caribbean. Christine is also a past board member of the NRC and the Virginia Recycling Association.

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Brandt Ryder, Ph.D.

BRANDT RYDER, PH.D.

Research Scientist

Brandt was born and raised in Acton, MA and was a naturalist from an early age. He received his bachelors of science in 1999 from a small environmental school in Maine called Unity College. Brandt completed his Ph.D. in Biology in 2008 from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Dr. Ryder has worked as a Research Scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute for the las 10 years. Brandt is a broadly trained avian ecologist that works on the migration, behavior and conservation of birds. His research program leverages novel tracking approaches to study the complex social networks of animals and document the movement patterns of migratory birds. Effective conservation requires understanding when and where birds face threats and how social systems contribute to population persistence.

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Tracey Barnes

TRACEY BARNES

Senior Animal Keeper, Great Cats and Bears, Smithsonian National Zoological Park

Tracey Barnes is a senior animal keeper at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, where she began as a keeper aide in the Mammal Department in 1994. She has been involved with the care of everything from elephant shrews to elephants (including a number of non-mammals), but her areas of specialty have been primarily bears, great cats, cheetahs and hoofstock. For the past 17 years, she has worked exclusively for the Great Cats and Bears Unit, where she currently cares for African lions, Amur and Sumatran tigers, Andean bears, small cats and other small carnivores, a variety of rodents, and domestic farm animals.

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Kristina Vsevolodova

KRISTINA VSEVOLODOVA

Research Intern, Elephants

Kristina is a lifelong animal lover. Currently she lives in the outer suburbs of Washington DC, however she spent majority of her adult life down under in Australia. Kristina graduated from The University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Science and a major in Zoology. With her degree she was fortunate enough to have the flexibility to explore different subjects as she was unsure as to what her future held. In the end she focused on conservation genomics, a field to which she had never been exposed before. This led Kristina to return to her childhood ambition of working in wildlife conservation and, given this opportunity at the Smithsonian National Zoo, she is on her way to living her dream.

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Tremaine (Tremie) Gregory, Ph.D

TREMAINE (TREMIE) GREGORY, PH.D

Research Scientist

Tremie is an ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Sustainability. Her work focuses on the impacts of hydrocarbon development activity on wildlife in the Amazon and methods to mitigate such impacts. Currently, she is studying the impacts of the construction of an hydrocarbon pipeline on terrestrial and arboreal mammals. She is using innovative technologies such as camera traps and drones to evaluate impacts. Tremie pioneered methods in arboreal camera trapping to test the effectiveness of natural canopy bridges over a pipeline right-of-way in mitigating forest fragmentation. Her findings could help improve best practices in pipeline construction across the Amazon to reduce impacts on arboreal and terrestrial wildlife.

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Dawn Zimmerman

DR. DAWN ZIMMERMAN

Associate Director, Global Health Program

Dr. Dawn Zimmerman is the associate program director for the Global Health Program where she focuses on coordinating international teams on the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT programs in Myanmar and Kenya. These teams work to detect the next pandemic human pathogens by investigating
the animals most likely to harbor them. Zimmerman’s field experience includes wildlife work and capacity building in the Russian Far East, Madagascar, Namibia, El Salvador, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through a University of California at Davis position as the regional veterinary manager for Gorilla Doctors, Zimmerman worked with USAID PREDICT in Uganda and Rwanda from 2011 to 2013. Her primary research interests include applying a One Health approach to the conservation of critically endangered wildlife species and the mitigation of emerging infectious diseases at the wildlife-human interface.

Zimmerman has worked in the field of zoological and wildlife medicine for over 14 years. She completed her Master of Science from San Diego State University and her Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from Ross University. Her master’s degree work focused on development of techniques for reproductive assistance in exotic canids and she has a particular interest in the conservation of African carnivores.

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Dr. Jennifer Sklarew

DR. JENNIFER SKLAREW

Assistant Professor, George Mason University

Dr. Jennifer Sklarew brings 25 years of energy and environmental policymaking and analysis to her research and teaching. She teaches graduate and undergraduate energy policy and food-energy-water nexus courses she developed for ESP. Her published and funded work examines how institutional relationships and catastrophic events drive energy and environmental policymaking and change. Specific areas of focus include sustainability and resilience challenges in the energy-water nexus, solutions that leverage energywater interdependencies, and energy system transitions in Japan, India, and China. Dr. Sklarew currently leads a project to design, build and deploy hydropower micro-turbines on Mason’s Fairfax campus and analyze technological, ecological, geographical, socio-economic and institutional challenges. Her faculty student team will use this data to develop potential solutions and lessons learned, to which they will add as they conduct additional pilots in overseas communities facing severe energy and water insecurity.

Jennifer’s prior professional experience spans the public and private sectors. She has served as the sector expert for a FEMAfunded project on protection of U.S. electricity infrastructure, and she represented Mason on Arlington County’s Community Energy Plan Implementation Review Committee. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Sklarew served in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Japan, where she led her office’s work on Japanese electricity and gas deregulation, as well as the AsiaPacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Prior to entering the government, Dr. Sklarew worked as a DC-based energy policy consultant to Japanese utility companies, and as a policy analyst for the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former rapporteur for the Council’s Energy Security Group, Jennifer received her Ph.D. in public policy from George Mason University, her MA from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Sarah Karush

SARAH KARUSH

Chapter Leader, Citizens’ Climate Lobby

Sarah has been volunteering with Citizens’ Climate Lobby since 2016. She works as a writer and editor for a nonprofit research organization and is a former reporter for The Associated Press. Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a non-profit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. Utilizing a consistently respectful, nonpartisan approach to climate education is designed to create a broad, sustainable foundation for climate action across all geographic regions and political inclinations. By building upon shared values rather than partisan divides, and empowering our supporters to work in keeping with the concerns of their local communities, we work towards the adoption of fair, effective, and sustainable climate change solutions.

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Nadia Nazar

NADIA NAZAR

Co-Founder, Co-Executive Director, & Art Director, Zero Hour

I love nature, the environment, and every soul in it. It is such a tragedy that something so beautiful and innocent is being destroyed. No one deserves to live in a world where nature has died and climate change is killing the world that we need. The issue of climate change is now simply about survival. Climate change is killing souls and it will continue to do so. This is not okay. So I am not waiting for someone else to save the future.” Nadia is a Girl Scout Senior who has been a vegetarian since age 12 and loves to paint and create art in her free time.

The Zero Hour movement started with our founder, 16-year-old Jamie Margolin. Frustrated by the inaction of elected officials and the fact that youth voices were almost always ignored in the conversation around climate change and the profound impact that it would have on young people, Jamie started gathering several of her friends in the summer of 2017 to start organizing something big, something hard to ignore! Nadia Nazar, Madelaine Tew, and Zanagee Artis joined her in her efforts.

Jamie realized that a national day of mass action, led by youth, would be an ideal platform to ensure that young voices were not only centered in this conversation, but that elected officials and adults would hear their voices loud and clear! By the end of the summer, young activists from across the country, from diverse backgrounds, had joined the team and the Zero Hour movement had started taking shape. Nadia now serves as the co-founder, co-executive director, and art director.

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Justine Ammendolia

JUSTINE AMMENDOLIA

Explorer, National Geographic

Justine Ammendolia is a marine biologist, plastic pollution researcher and science communicator based out of Toronto, Canada. In 2014, she was awarded the National Geographic Young Explorer Grant to travel to Eastern Greenland to research Arctic seabirds and lived off-grid for 6 weeks. During this time, she fostered a deep passion for protecting the corners of our planet and their unique ecosystems, particularly those in our Northern environments. For the past few years while living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Justine helped develop the Placentia Bay Ocean Debris Survey, a research team focused on monitoring plastic pollution on the coastlines of Newfoundland. Using a combination of citizen science methods and working with locals, her work aimed to better understand the presence and movement of plastics in coastal waters. Justine is also passionate about sharing her knowledge and experiences in STEM with younger audiences and has keynoted a number of youth leadership events. Through her research and communication, Justine aims to inspire others to care about protecting our aquatic environments.