Join current and alumni Science & Technology Policy Fellows as they explore the science policy arena through projects from academia, government, industry, nonprofit organizations, and the arts. Participants have challenged themselves to think visually: each will present 20 images for only 20 seconds each.
Following the lightning talks will be a science policy open house and networking reception with representatives from various AAAS programs, partner scientific societies, science policy agencies, and organizations. Exhibit tabling begins at 5:30 p.m. and continues during the reception. Join us in this exciting, fast-paced evening of compelling issues and discussion! Sponsored by AAAS.
PRESENTERS
Timia Crisp McClain, 2015-16 American Geophysical Union Congressional Fellow, House Committee on Energy & Commerce (minority)
Gifford Wong, American Geosciences Institute Congressional Science Fellow, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
During the 2015-2016 fellowship year, Congress had no shortage of interesting issues that came to the forefront. Understanding the story behind the news reports is even more interesting. In this presentation, two Congressional fellows will discuss their experiences in what was known as a “Do-Nothing Congress”. Particularly, how the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate address differing priorities to advance policy agendas.
Timia received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, San Diego in 2014. In her doctoral research, Timia developed novel instrumentation to investigate trace gases in the troposphere and their impacts on public health. Afterward, she joined the Carnegie Institution for Science where she organized scientific programming and oversaw special initiatives for the Institution’s president. As a fellow in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, she works on energy and environment issues, including safe drinking water, air quality, and contaminated properties.
Gifford received his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from Dartmouth College (NH). His doctoral dissertation is focused on the chemistry of snow and ice in northwest Greenland and, in particular, examines how changes in temperature and atmospheric circulation are related to trends in annual precipitation. He has done fieldwork in Greenland and Antarctica, and helped develop and instruct a graduate-level science communication course at Dartmouth. As a fellow in the office of Senator Whitehouse, he works on energy, transportation, and climate issues, including writing the Senator's weekly floor address on climate change.
Roberto Delgado, Scientific Program Manager, Research Analyst; National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Institute of Mental Health and 2013-2015 Executive Branch at NSF
Suicide is a public health crisis, and Arctic indigenous communities are particularly impacted. RISING SUN is an initiative under the U.S. chairmanship of the Arctic Council designed to create a toolkit with community-based outcomes and measures to evaluate suicide prevention interventions. The ultimate goal is to generate shared knowledge that will aid behavioral health workers in better serving their communities, and help policy-makers measure progress, evaluate interventions, and overcome regional and cultural challenges to implementation.
Dr. Delgado supports NIH efforts to reduce to mental health disparities within and outside the United States. In this capacity, he is coordinating RISING SUN, an Arctic Council initiative with the goal of producing a toolkit that enables Arctic indigenous communities, clinicians, governments, researchers, and key stakeholders to measure the effectiveness of suicide prevention interventions. He arrived at NIMH following an STPF fellowship at the National Science Foundation (NSF). At NSF, he worked in the Directorate for Geosciences supporting the research goals and policy activities of the Arctic Sciences Section in the Division of Polar Programs through his engagement in the Arctic Executive Steering Committee, the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee, the U.S. Arctic Policy Group, and two international working groups of the Arctic Council focused on the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna, as well as on sustainable development. Prior to his fellowship, Dr. Delgado was a faculty member at the University of Southern California with joint appointments in the departments of anthropology and biological sciences. His research interests centered on integrative and evolutionary biology, and he directed international field projects focused on the behavioral ecology and conservation of endangered non-human primates, with implications for understanding the origins and evolution of human behavior.
Barbara Martinez, Open Innovation Director, Conservation X Labs and 2011-2012 Executive Branch Fellow at Geological Survey and 2012-2013 Executive Branch Fellow at Environmental Protection Agency
Conservation X Labs is a conservation innovation startup founded by alumni STPF fellows to create, harness, and scale open source approaches and exponential technologies for conservation. Humankind's footprint on the planet has grown exponentially, but our solutions to conservation are incremental. We aim to reinvent conservation to operate at the pace of and on the scale necessary to match the enormous environmental challenges of our day. To do so, we must broaden the number of minds and disciplines engaged in defining and addressing conservation challenges, imagine completely new approaches, harness new technologies, engage new solvers and entrepreneurs, generate new solutions, and bring those solutions to scale using the power of markets.
Barbara Martinez is the Open Innovation Director for Conservation X Labs and is leading the Blue Economy Challenge to re-engineer aquaculture. Her expertise is in conservation biology, wildlife ecology, innovative solutions for environmental protection, and science policy. Since 2012, Barbara has served as a science policy fellow in the Office of the Science Advisor and the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she led the creation of a policy to streamline the implementation of citizen science projects for federal scientists, and developed and evaluated policies on scientific integrity. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Barbara spent much of her time in a laboratory or remote field sites studying endocrine disruption in prairie voles, seed dispersal by lemurs, subsistence farmers’ perceptions of protected areas, seed dispersal by hornbills and monkeys, and songbird behavior. Barbara has her PhD in Conservation Biology from the University of Minnesota with a minor in Development Studies and Social Change and a BS in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Danyal Petersen, 2016-2017 Executive Branch Fellow at U.S. Department of State
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is upon us. Just Google it or ask Siri as your Tesla drives you to work. What you probably won’t do is ask your local Assistant Secretary of State how she leverages AI to develop strategy. This simply won’t do! In an age of increasing technological complexity, our leaders must adapt by leveraging AI systems in their decision making process. They must learn to stop resisting and love AI.
Danyal received his B.S. in Astrophysics and M.S. in Physics from the University of Oklahoma and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Nevada. His doctoral work centered on understanding basic physical processes in atmospheric lightning. He did his postdoctoral work as a member of the DARPA NIMBUS team, studying the physics of lightning initiation and leader extension. As a current fellow, he works at the Department of State in the Office of Foreign Assistance Resources, the primary budget office responsible for $32 billion in foreign assistance programming by the State Department and USAID.
Jennifer Reineke Pohlhaus, Vice President, Ripple Effect Communications, Inc. and 2006-08 Executive Branch Fellow at the National Institutes of Health
After her fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she worked on the agency’s response to the Beyond Bias and Barriers National Academies report, Jennifer joined Ripple Effect Communications. With her business partner, she provides Intelligent Project Management TM to clients including NIH and NSF. She will provide an insider’s view on what it takes to transition a science policy career into the business world.
At Ripple Effect Communications she oversees client-focused business areas. Under her leadership, the company coordinated several high-visibility government projects including many for NIH such as Enhancing Peer Review, NIH Guide Publishing System Development, Financial Conflicts of Interest Regulation, Recovery Act Communications, and Biomedical Workforce Diversity. She has received two NIH Director’s Awards and two awards from the Office of Extramural Research for Extreme Dedication.
Carolyn Shore, Officer, Antibiotic Resistance Project, Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew) and 2011-12 American Society of Microbiology Congressional Fellow and 2012-14 Executive Branch Fellow at U.S. Department of State
Every antibiotic in use today is based on a discovery from over than 30 years ago. Pew’s Roadmap for Antibiotic Discovery lays out a strategy to break through the most significant scientific barriers impeding antibiotic discovery. Global leaders have highlighted the pressing need for new antibiotics. Pew’s roadmap translate this call-to-action into concrete steps to transform antibiotic innovation, end the 30-year drought in the discovery, and pave the way for urgently needed therapies.
As an officer on Pew’s antibiotic resistance project, Carolyn leads work on research and policies to help spur the discovery and development of urgently needed antibiotics. Prior to joining Pew, she served as a foreign affairs officer at the U.S. Department of State, where she led an initiative on open data and innovation-based solutions to global challenges. As the State Department’s representative to several intergovernmental organizations focusing on biosecurity, food safety, and agricultural trade policy, Carolyn had the opportunity to travel to exciting places, such as Geneva, Singapore, and Des Moines, Iowa. Previously, she was an American Society for Microbiology congressional fellow, working on science-based policy related to antibiotic stewardship and other public health issues. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Ph.D. in microbiology and molecular genetics from Harvard University.
Brad Wible, Senior Editor, Science magazine and 2005-07 Executive Branch Fellow at National Institutes of Health
A grad student at CERN, an ecologist in Indonesia, a psychologist in Bethesda, where can they turn to see the best in their field, but also where science is going more broadly, and how it can shape, and be shaped by, broader social, economic, and political trends? Every week, Science aims to help readers be well-informed members of the broad, global scientific community.
Brad is a senior editor at Science magazine, where he is responsible for soliciting and editing commentaries for the Policy Forum and Education Forum pages. After earning a BS in physics from Drexel University, a PhD in neuroscience from Northwestern University, and dipping his toes into a postdoc at the University of Oregon, he took a detour. The AAAS Mass Media fellowship program helped him spend a summer writing for the Los Angeles Times, after which he drove to DC and sat in this auditorium to begin an STPF fellowship at the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. A stint at the AAAS Research Competitiveness Program followed, then a staff position at the Kellogg School of Management, and finally a boomerang back to the AAAS building, landing on the 10th floor with Science. When not scrambling to meet weekly deadlines, he’s lately been practicing getting a good night’s sleep in a tent with three other people, two of whom wear diapers.
David R. Wunsch, Director and State Geologist, Delaware Geological Survey, University of Delaware and 1998-99 American Geological Institute Congressional Fellow
A 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decree settled an interstate water conflict within the Delaware River Basin, and established a governance body with representatives from the Decree Parties of New York City (NYC), New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Subsequent “water wars” and conflicts between competing interests have created unique challenges for the Decree Parties as they strive to provide equitable access to the limited water resources provided by the Delaware River.
Prior to his work with the Delaware Geological Survey (DGS), David worked at the National Ground Water Association (NGWA). He was the State Geologist of New Hampshire from 2000 to 2010, and had statutory appointments to the New Hampshire Joint Board of Geology, and the NH Water Well Board, which oversee the licensing and adjudicatory proceedings for professional geologists and licensed well drillers, respectively. He is a Licensed Professional Geologist in Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Delaware. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of New Hampshire, and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, and is currently an affiliated researcher at the University of Delaware. His scientific interests and areas of expertise are ground-water monitoring and exploration, aqueous geochemistry, mine hydrology, and engineering geology.
As a fellow, he served as an advisor to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources. David has served on federal advisory committees, and study committees of the National Academy of Science, and has testified before Congress regarding national water and energy issues. In 2002, he was selected as a member of a delegation of U.S. scientists who took part in Presence Switzerland, sponsored by the Swiss Government, which reviewed Swiss renewable energy and environmental programs. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the scientists and engineers division of NGWA, and as an associate editor of the journal Groundwater. He also has served as the Secretary of the American Geological Institute (AGI), and as President of the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) in 2010. Wunsch has represented AASG on the Federal Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI), the National Water Quality Monitoring Council (NWQMC), and the Subcommittee on Ground Water (SOGW). David is a founding member of the SOGW, which developed a framework for monitoring the Nation’s ground-water resources. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. He was presented the 1999 Outstanding Kentucky Geologist Award by the Kentucky Chapter of the American Institute of Professional Geologists, and in 2014, he received AGI’s Outstanding Contribution to the Understanding of Geoscience award.