An urban and land change scientist, Karen Seto is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. She uses satellite remote sensing, field interviews, and modeling methods to understand how urbanization will affect the planet, including land change, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years and in India for more than ten. Dr. Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She was a coordinating lead author for the 2022 IPCC 6th Assessment Report and the 2014 IPCC 5th Assessment Report. For both reports she co-led the chapter on urban mitigation of climate change. She currently co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Climate Security Roundtable, established by the direction of Congress to help better understand and anticipate the ways climate change affects U.S. national security interests. She also co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Subcommittee on U.S.- China Scientific Engagement. From 2000 to 2008, she was faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received many awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers.

Dr. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and a Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a PhD in Geography from Boston University.

Mayor Vallo was born in Bratislava and received his secondary education in Rome. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture of the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. As an architect, he gained foreign work experience, including in London. He holds a Fulbright scholarship at Columbia University in New York.

One of the main goals of Matúš Vallo and his team is to make Bratislava a strong and self-confident city with a high level of transparency as an important tool in the fight against corruption. Mayor Vallo places great emphasis, among other things, on high-quality public space, drawing on his own professional experience in this topic. Important topics for the mayor and his team are the fight against the climate crisis, the strengthening of accessible public transport, the social sector and assistance to disadvantaged groups.

In 2021, he received the World Mayor Future Award from The City Mayors Foundation for his efforts to transform Bratislava into a greener city with high-quality public space.

Mayor Vallo is a co-founder of the Pact of Free Cities, which he founded with the mayors of Warsaw, Prague and Budapest in 2019. In the same year, he received a scholarship from the Bloomberg Philanthropies educational program for mayors from cities around the world called the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

Jessica Seddon is a Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Her work on environmental governance focuses on how new sources of data can be leveraged to enable new (and more sustainable) ways of interacting with the environment around us. Her career in India and the U.S. spans academic, program leadership, and strategic advisory roles focused on institutional design for integrating science into policy and social initiatives.

Jessica is a co-founder of The Institutional Architecture Lab (TIAL) and Senior Fellow at Artha Global, a networked policy consulting organization that supports governments in the developing world to design, implement and institutionalize policy frameworks that promote prosperity, stability, and resilience. She is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Chair in U.S.-India Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and serves on the academic council of the Indian School of Public Policy in New Delhi.

Dr. Hallett (B.S. UW- Madison, M.S. and Ph.D. UNH) started his career in forestry on Prince of Wales Island in the Tongass National Forest, worked as a regeneration forester for Mead Paper on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (logging in the winter), was woodlands manager for the University of New Hampshire while obtaining his master’s degree, finally obtaining a Ph.D. in Natural Resources in 1996.

He has spent his scientific career studying tree and forest health in the northeastern U.S. First conducting regional scale studies across the Allegheny, Green Mountain and White Mountain National forests. In 2010 he joined the NYC Urban Field station and began to study urban ecosystems. He brings lessons learned from studying rural forest management to urban ecology.

Currently he is working with a team to adapt silvicultural practices to urban forested natural areas in the northeastern U.S. He also works to establish a dialog between urban and rural forest management professionals

Clara Pregitzer is the Deputy Director of Conservation Science at the Natural Areas Conservancy. In this capacity, she leads the organization’s research and conservation efforts in natural areas in NYC as well as other U.S. cities. She led the Forest Assessment component of the Natural Areas Conservancy Ecological Assessment for NYC parkland and the development of the Forest Management Framework. She previously worked with NYC Park’s Natural Resources Group, conducting ecological assessments in over 1500 acres of New York City Parks.

She holds a B.S. in Forestry from Northern Arizona University, a M.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Tennessee and a PhD from Yale School of the Environment.

Kelli oversees the Natural Resources Division at the City of Houson. In her role, Kelli implements conservation initiatives for the department to meet habitat management, restoration, research, land acquisition, and education goals. She is responsible for overseeing the Conservation Master Plan and conservation policy for the department, including Nature Preserve Ordinance, Natural Area Ordinance other departmental policies. Kelli’s habitat restoration experience includes managing projects in riparian forest, wetland, and coastal prairie habitats throughout urban and rural areas of Texas. She is the Departmental Resilience and Sustainability Officer HPARD and works to create and implement resilience projects throughout the park system.

Dr. Matthew Browning (MESc, 2012), Founding Director of the Virtual Reality & Nature Lab and Associate Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University, is a globally recognized scholar investigating the impact of nature on human health. His research aims to optimize nature-based solutions, measure nature exposure, and promote sustainability and nature-human interactions through technology. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and is ranked among the most productive and cited researchers in the fields of parks, recreation, and health based on recent PubMed metrics. He also acts as the Scientific Advisor for NatureQuant, developer of the personalized nature prescription app, NatureDoseTM.  Examples of his recent work include the role of virtual reality in hospice care and disaster readiness; the environmental determinants of fatal police shootings, suicides, healthcare expenditures, and other pressing issues; and the categorization of natural landscapes that promote health. He increasingly focuses on engaging vulnerable populations in scalable urban greening initiatives for heat reduction and climate resilience.

Dr. Browning has a BA in Biology from Oberlin College, a MESc from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a PhD in Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation from Virgina Tech.

Professor Nancy B. Grimm is an ecosystem ecologist who studies the interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. Grimm was founding director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER, co-directed the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, and now co-directs the NATURA and ESSA networks, all focused on solving problems of the Anthropocene, especially in cities.

With collaborators and students, her research centers on nature-based, technological, and governance solutions that can build resilience to a future with increased frequency and magnitude of extreme events. In streams, Grimm studies how hydrologic and climatic variability influence ecosystem processes such as stream metabolism and nutrient dynamics, and more recently, the impacts of a novel desert disturbance (wildfire) on stream processes through hydrologic connectivity of upland to stream-riparian corridor.

Grimm was President of the Ecological Society of America and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has made >220 contributions to the scientific literature with colleagues and students.