David Abel
David Abel, MISI’s Associate Director of Creative Works, is an award-winning reporter and documentary filmmaker who has covered war, coups, terrorism, natural disasters, a pandemic, poverty, climate change, and more. He has been a writer for The Boston Globe, where for the past decade he has covered climate change and other environmental issues. In 2014, Abel and his colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. His films have been broadcast on the Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC World News, and other major platforms, winning numerous awards, including a Jackson Wild award for the film, “Entangled,” and Sigma Delta Chi awards for feature reporting and climate reporting.
Kenneth Bailey
Kenneth Bailey is the co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si). His interests focus on the research and development of design tools for and with marginalized communities to address complex social issues. With over three decades of experience in community practice, Bailey brings a unique perspective on the ethics of design in relation to community engagement, the arts and cultural action. Projects he has produced at ds4si include Action Lab (2012- 2014), Public Kitchen (2011-2018), Social Emergency Response Center(SERC) (2018) and People’s Redevelopment Authority (2018). Bailey was recently a Visiting Scholar in collaboration with University of Tasmania and also a founding member of Theatrum Mundi NYC with Richard Sennett. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Bennington College.
Ian Cheney
Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He has completed ten feature documentaries, including King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), The City Dark (2011), The Search for General Tso (2014), Bluespace (2015), The Most Unknown (2018), The Emoji Story (2019), Thirteen Ways (2019), Picture a Scientist (2020) and The Long Coast (2020).His short films include Two Buckets (2006), Truck Farm (2010), The Melungeons (2013), The Smog of the Sea (2016) and The Measure of a Fog (2017).
Mariette DiChristina
Mariette DiChristina is the dean of the College of Communication at Boston University and an internationally recognized science journalist. Before arriving in 2019, DiChristina was the editor-in-chief and executive vice president of Scientific American, as well as executive vice president, magazines, of the magazine’s publisher, Springer Nature. The first woman to head Scientific American since its founding in 1845, she led the editorial team to honors including the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Beyond her role as dean, DiChristina chairs the Steering Group for the “Top 10 Emerging Technologies” for the World Economic Forum and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Joan Donovan
Joan Donovan, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communications at Boston University. She is the founder of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, a non-profit that develops educational programs advancing public knowledge of emerging technologies and the paradoxes of innovation. Donovan co-created the beaver emoji 🦫.
Barbara Espinosa Barrera
Barbara Espinosa Barrera works at GreenRoots as the Environmental Justice and Health Equity Organizer. She is passionate about sharing science, health, and environmental justice information by telling stories. She was a 2023 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow and she traveled to Ecuador to report on an active volcano near her hometown. She is a graduate of the BU School of Public Health where she focused on Environmental Health. In her free time she loves to read, play soccer, and bake.
M. Patricia Fabian
M. Patricia Fabian is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Associate Director at the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University. She founded the Sustainable Built Environment Lab which conducts research on extreme heat resilience in cities, indoor air quality in schools and homes, and energy transitions in the built environment. Dr. Fabian leads multiple interdisciplinary teams and is a faculty affiliate of the BUSPH Center for Climate and Health and the BU Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.
Santi Garces
As a kid growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, Santiago “Santi” Garces witnessed the near collapse of the national government and the general disillusionment of national politics, along with creative and unconventional approaches to solve issues at the local level. Those experiences developed a lifelong passion for making government more efficient and effective for citizens. Santi joined the City of Boston as Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) to help push forward Mayor Wu’s vision of building a government that earns the trust of its people. As CIO, Santi oversees the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) – his goal is to create a new chapter in that history so that DoIT can continue to be an engine of transformation in the service of residents and employees.
Eric Gordon
Eric Gordon, MISI’s Director, studies technology, democracy, and public engagement, with a specific focus on the role of narrative, data, and algorithms on institutional trust and governance. He specializes in collaborative research and design processes, and has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that help organizations transform to meet their stated values. He is specifically recognized for his work in civic games, designing games to foster democratic participation in the US, Egypt, Bhutan, Romania, and many other countries. He is a founding member of the RethinkAI collective which works with communities and local governments around the US to build community-centered use cases of generative AI for public value. He is the author of over 50 articles and chapters on media and urbanism, and the author of two books on the topic. His new book, Generative Listening: How We Can Leverage New Tech to Build Trust will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Before coming to BU, Dr. Gordon was a professor and the founder and director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.
Carol Gregory
Carol Gregory is the Senior Vice President for Communications and Marketing at Conservation Law Foundation. In this role Carol develops and oversees external communication and marketing initiatives including media relations, online engagement, and development communications. Carol has more than 20 years of strategic communications, marketing, and broadcast journalism experience. Following a career in television, where she produced and wrote national and syndicated television specials and documentaries, she turned her attention to elevating the message, mission, and visibility of advocacy organizations. She has held leadership roles at a wide range of global and national nonprofits focusing on issues from the environment and human rights to broadband access and public health.
Michael Grunwald
Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist who is a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. He is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine. He is also the best-selling author of The Swamp, The New New Deal, and the forthcoming We Are Eating the Earth, a book about the race to feed the world without frying the world. He has won numerous honors for his work, including the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting. He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, their two kids, Max and Lina, and their three deranged dogs.
Melissa Hoffer
Melissa Hoffer is Massachusetts’ first ever Climate Chief. Through the Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience, she leads the state in a “whole of government” approach to tackling the climate crisis. Prior to serving in this role, she worked for the Biden Administration as the Acting General Counsel and Principal Deputy General Counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency, and worked within the Massachusetts’ Attorney General’s Office prior to that.
Amml Hussein
As a clinician, researcher, and advocate for marginalized communities, Amml Hussein’s work centers on civic science communication as a vital tool to address the complex impacts of environmental and social crises on mental health. She emphasizes trauma-informed, community-driven solutions that empower affected populations. Her research explores AI expressive arts for trauma recovery, which highlights the healing potential of creative interventions co-designed with communities, prioritizing their voices and lived experiences over extractive approaches. In 2024, as COM’s Civic Science Fellow, she played a key role in creating a graduate certificate program in civic science communication where they co-designed the program to equip students with the skills to foster trust, collaboration, and transparency in science.
Meghan Irons
Meghan Irons is a social justice reporter in Boston and journalism professor at Boston University. She worked for the Boston Globe for two decades and was a lead reporter for the paper’s Valedictorians Project, which was a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. Her work on the project lead to the formation of the paper’s Great Divide Project, which explored race, class and opportunity in the public schools in Greater Boston. Irons was also an investigative reporter on Globe’s elite Spotlight Team.
Dan Mauzy
Dan Mauzy has led the WBUR newsroom since 2020, overseeing local journalism and news strategy across platforms following a decade working as an editor and producer in the newsroom. During his time as executive editor, the newsroom has won many national awards for its journalism, including six national Murrows, and WBUR rose to become the number one news station in Greater Boston with the highest listenership share in the organization’s history. At WBUR Dan has built up the newsroom’s reporting and digital teams, forged new journalism partnerships, established WBUR’s ethics guidelines, edited investigative projects and directed live coverage of major breaking news events, including the lockdown and manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers.
Brian McGrory
Brian McGrory is the former editor of The Boston Globe. During Brian’s decade-long run, the Globe won three Pulitzer Prizes and was a finalist another dozen times in categories ranging from Public Service to Feature Photography. The news organization also amassed more than 240,000 digital-only subscribers, making it an industry leader with a growing newsroom. Prior to this, Brian worked as a nationally award-winning metro columnist, a White House correspondent, national correspondent, and general assignment reporter, all during a 34-year career at the Globe. He has authored five published books and serves on the boards of The Baltimore Banner, the News Leaders Association, and the World Editors Forum. He is also writing a regular column for The Boston Globe.
Pedro Mello e Cruz
Pedro Mello e Cruz is an entrepreneur who has found circus to be a tool for human development. His qualifications include a bachelor’s degree in Communication (UFPR/Brazil), a specialization in Acrobatics (Beijing International Arts School), and a postgraduate degree from École Nationale de Cirque (Montreal). Through his work with Circocan, the Brazilian company he founded in 2003, Pedro has developed innovative programs that take circus beyond the big top. The project includes collaborations with organizations such as Cirque du Soleil, the Red Cross, the Climate Centre, the World Bank, NASA, and several public and private institutions in Brazil. Through Pedro’s work, circus activities and concepts embody how we can communicate, manage, and navigate risks in a safe way to achieve greater challenges, both individually and as a community.
Nathan Phillips
Nathan Phillips is Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University. He is a physiological ecologist who studies land-climate interactions in terrestrial ecosystems and human-dominated environments, including exchanges of energy, water, and greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide exchanged between the air and leaves, soil, buildings, humans, and pipelines. He works with advocates, community members and policymakers to apply my research to advance sustainable communities and a habitable planet.
Ainissa Ramirez
Ainissa Ramirez, Ph.D., is an award-winning scientist and science communicator, who is the author of “The Alchemy of Us” (MIT Press). A graduate of Brown University, she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford. Dr. Ramirez began her career as a scientist at Bell Labs and was later an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale. She has written for Time, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Forbes, American Scientist, Nature, and Science and has explained science headlines on CBS, CNN, NPR, and PBS. She speaks widely on the impact of science and technology and gave a TED talk on the importance of science education. (www.ainissaramirez.com)
Andrew Revkin
Andrew Revkin is a longtime environmental journalism innovator and author whose main focus since 2020 is a video webcast and Substack newsletter on sustainability challenges called Sustain What. He spent more than 40 years reporting on climate change, mostly for The New York Times. Revkin has built programs and courses fostering sustainability-communication impact at Columbia University, Pace University and the National Geographic Society, where he has been a member of the Committee on Research and Exploration since 2018. His five books include “The Burning Season,” a prize-winning biography of slain rain forest defender Chico Mendes that was the basis for the 1994 HBO film of the same name. He lives on the Maine coast with his wife and sometime co-author Lisa Mechaley and is spending more time these days focused on songwriting and performing. More: http://j.mp/revkinlinks
Sue Robinson
Sue Robinson holds the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism research chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is the author of three books all about how mainstream journalism might become more relevant to more communities: How Journalists Engage: A theory of trust building, identities and care (Oxford, 2023), News After Trump: Journaism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford, 2021), and Networked News, Racial Divides: How power and privilege shape public discourse in progressive communities. She does applied research in partnership with the journalism industry as well.
Meera Subramanian
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes narrative nonfiction about home, in the personal and planetary sense, in a time of climate crisis. Her work has appeared in publications such as Nature, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. She is the co-author of A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, a nonfiction YA graphic novel (coming out in March 3, 2026) and author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, (PublicAffairs 2015), which was short-listed for the Orion Book Award. She also teaches creative nonfiction at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program in Tennessee. A National Geographic Explorer and recipient of multiple grants, fellowships and residencies, she is a perpetual wanderer who can’t stop digging in the dirt to plant perennials and looking up in search of birds from her home base atop a glacial moraine on the Atlantic’s western edge. You can find her at www.meerasub.org.
Cass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations. Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and books, and is now working on group decision making and various projects on the idea of liberty.
Kannan Thiruvengadam
Kannan Thiruvengadam grew up near his family farm in India. He left a career in technology to work on climate and community resiliency. He runs Eastie Farm, an urban farm in East Boston that fosters food security and environmental stewardship. He managed the construction of the first geothermally powered greenhouse in the region, which is now a community asset for all-year food distribution/growing, distribution of fresh produce from small farmers around the state, and education. He also serves the community (e.g.: Friends of Belle Isle Marsh) and the city (Conservation Commission) in various capacities.
Chris Wells
Chris Wells, MISI’s Associate Director of Research, worked in environmental politics before attending graduate school at the University of Washington, where he focused on political communication and early social media. In his research, Chris uses a variety of methods, both conventional and computational, to study how news media coverage takes shape, how citizens learn about politics, and how they choose to participate. His most recent work is exploring how people can understand the many different media around us as making up an interactive media system.
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman is Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. His work examines the use of social media in diverse contexts and examines ownership and governance structures to make social media more democratic. He is the author of Digital Cosmopolitans (2013), Mistrust (2021) and forthcoming from MIT Press with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, A Field Guide to Social Media (2025). With Rebecca MacKinnon, he is co-founder of the international citizen media community Global Voices. He and his family live in the Berkshire mountains of western MA, USA.