Jennifer Atkinson is an assistant teaching professor at UW Bothell Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, whose area of focus is Environmental Humanities.  When teaching about existential threats like our climate and biodiversity crises, she works to address the emotional impact this material has on students. Processing and applying difficult information about climate injustice can give rise to emotional, psychological and intellectual challenges that are too seldom made explicit in teaching. Yet educational research shows that growing rates of hopelessness, guilt, nihilism and despair among young people compromises their ability to think critically or respond creatively. Moreover, it can ultimately lead students to shut down and withdraw rather than engage in climate solutions. Her classes offer a space to confront those feelings head on. She  also addresses the intersections of racial justice, privilege, trauma, colonialism, and power in climate change and its solutions.

Maya Magarati, Acting Assistant Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors, and Seven Directions Center for Indigenous Public Health. At Seven Directions, Dr. Magarati serves as a project lead on the Tribal Opioid Overdose Prevention project as well as a contributor to other Indigenous-focused community-engaged and community-partnered behavioral health research, evaluation, and technical assistance projects. She also serves as a preceptor for Nepal site on LUNA, an international Indigenous health research training program with the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute in the School of Social Work. Dr. Magarati's research interests include land-based and place-based ecological and traditional knowledge systems and practices for health and wellbeing.

Dr. Wölfle Hazard’s research informs two areas of thought: (1)  ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants, and (2) how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management.  An activist and artist with formal training in ecology, geomorphology, critical social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he conducts collaborative research in partnership with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members. Wölfle Hazard and his students are currently working on the Duwamish River in Washington and the Klamath River in California, as well as in the freshwater-saltwater interface around Puget Sound.

Inhwan Ko is a third-year Ph.D. student in Political Science. He is a Richard B. Wesley Fellow in Environmental Politics and Governance at the Center for Environmental Politics and a graduate fellow at the Clean Energy Institute. Prior to coming to the UW, he has been involved in a youth climate group in South Korea called "BigWave" as a youth climate activist after his participation in COP21 in Paris. 

Jonathan Kwong is an undergraduate studying Environmental Science and Resource Management with Interdisciplinary Programs. He has been a part of the Antiracism Advisory Team for the UW Department of Biology and an Ambassador for the College of the Environment. He is writing an environmental justice curriculum for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and is a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar for UC Santa Cruz, working with native communities to collaborate on conservation research.

Bryan Pelach is a geographer and PhD Candidate in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. His research focuses on how ecosystem sustainability and community wellbeing in the rural Pacific Northwest are impacted by climate change (particularly increased wildfire), and how these changes are affecting perceptions of appropriate public lands management.

Aisha Rashid is a second-year undergrad, spending her time at the University of Washington studying Marine Biology with a minor in American Indian Studies. She finds interest in the intersection of science and societies, growing up in the era where climate change has become the forefront of our global struggles.