PROJECT LEADS

Project participants

Amy Adler works across the disciplines of drawing, performance, photography, and film. Her practice explores media and process considering subjects that exist between paradigms and identities. Born and raised in New York City, Amy is a graduate of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. She attended Cooper Union and went on to receive her MFA in art practice from UCLA and film production from USC School of Cinematic Arts. She has had multiple international and national gallery and museum exhibitions including solo projects at MOCA Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Her drawings, films and photographs are included in permanent collections worldwide. In 2005 Twin Palms Press released a large-scale monograph entitled, Amy Adler Young Photographer. Amy's work is featured in multiple publications including Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon 2012). Her short films have screened at international film festivals including Frameline, Outfest, and BFI Flare. Amy Adler is a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been teaching at UCSD since 2004.

Steve Allison is Professor of Ecology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with a joint appointment in the Department of Earth System Science. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. In 2013, Dr. Allison was named an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America. As part of the University of California’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, Dr. Allison was named the UC Irvine Climate Action Champion in 2016. He teaches ecosystem ecology and directs the Ridge to Reef Graduate Training Program, an interdisciplinary program focused on skills development for students pursuing careers in environmental fields. His research addresses the resilience of microbial communities to drought and the effect of rapid climate change on carbon losses from southern California ecosystems. Dr. Allison is also building new mathematical models that incorporate feedbacks among microbial communities, carbon cycling, and climate change.

Bruce Appelgate is Associate Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he leads the Ship Operations and Marine Technical Support division, including the Institution's fleet of oceanographic research vessels. Dr. Appelgate earned a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from the University of Hawai`i in 1995, an M.S. degree in oceanography from Oregon State University in 1988, and a bachelor's degree in geology from Humboldt State University in 1985. He has participated in more than 100 oceanographic research missions as Principal Investigator, Chief Scientist, or Geophysicist. Dr. Appelgate's research interests include seafloor mapping and marine geology and geophysics, especially using bathymetric and imaging sonars to study the structure and tectonics of plate boundaries.

Adrian Avallone is an aeronautical engineer and pilot from Northern New York State based in Ventura, California.

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work addresses the decolonization of Western epistemologies, narratives of ecological collapse and nonhuman timescales. Baumann holds degrees from Harvard University and Prifysgol Caerdydd, and he has lectured throughout the United States and Europe at institutions such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania, Universität Bern, and Cornell University. He has been an artist in residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and ArtCenter College of Design’s Media Design Practices Department, and was a 2019-2020 Fellow of the Landscape Architecture Foundation. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications including e-flux architecture and The Invention of the American Desert (UC Press). His projects has been supported by institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Antipode Foundation for Radical Geography, Strelka Institute, and the Getty Foundation. Hans currently resides in Los Angeles.

Sakman Mario Borja is an engineer, master carver, and cultural preservationist who is Director of the Sakman Chamorro Project, through which he led the building of a 47-ft replica of the Anson single outrigger sailing canoe (aka Sakman) of the Mariana Islands in the mid-2010s. This is the first full-scale Mariana Islands outrigger to be constructed since 1742. It was moved from San Diego to the Islas Marianas in late 2010s. A mathematician and aerospace engineer, he has worked as a space surveillance analyst and a teacher in the San Diego community.

Deborah Forster was trained in behavioral ecology and cognitive science at UC San Diego. Her collaborative research experience spans academia and industry, focusing on automotive design, driving behavior, human-robot interaction, and health. She studied social complexity and distributed cognition in olive baboons in Kenya, developing a state-space (and time series) approach to analyzing complex social behavior. Forster applied this relational systems framework in her work with car designers, intelligent driver support systems research, architecture education, social robotics research, art-science collaborations, and movement education practice (Feldenkrais™). Some of her past projects supported interdisciplinary teams developing an open-source hearing research platform, automated pain detection in horses and other animals, kid-friendly robots, etc. She worked with Teddy Cruz on affordable housing in Nicaragua, the Political Equator Series, and the Blum Cross-Border Initiative. She was leader of the Social Interaction Network in the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, and a Research Specialist in the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego. Current projects include consulting to Waymo's Insight Team on autonomous driving, envisioning the future of robot-worker relations, and ongoing art-science collaboration with Rachel Mayeri. She is affiliated with the Design Lab at UC San Diego and the AiTech Group at TU-Delft.

Marianne (Mimi) George, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist whohas sailed over 100,000 nautical miles in remote oceans. Between 1979 and 1985 she documented ritual meaning and voyaging cycles for Papua New Guinea islanders. In 1982-84 George was Deputy Leader of an Antarctic winter-over expedition that used the centuries-old European method of freezing a sailboat in the sea-ice. They conducted 18 scientific research projects, including Georgeʻs study of their small, mixed gender group in prolonged isolation. George and David Lewis sailed with sea hunters and migrated with reindeer herders in Chukotka and Alaska during 1988 -1991. George then supported elder-led Siberian Yupik traditional skills summer camps at St Lawrence Island for the Subsistence Science and Video Project. George and Lewis met with Polynesian voyagers of SE Solomons in 1993, and responded to Paramount Chief Kaveia’s request to establish the Vaka Taumako Project (www.vaka.org). Kaveia led the training of youth to use only ancestral designs, materials, and methods to build voyaging vessels, navigate, and rebuild trans-oceanic networks. George writes about ancestral voyaging culture and directs the Pacific Traditions Society, which is building a proa working vessel to support ancestral voyaging education at Taumako.

Grace Grothaus is an artist whose research questions center on the present global climate crisis and futurity. Focusing on environmental sensing and visualization, her projects typically take the form of indoor and outdoor installations, and are often interactive or responsive in nature. Grothaus is concerned with the question of how to foster empathetic relationships between humans and our more-than-human environs in order to address our current critical issues. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and on five continents in venues including the 2nd World Creativity Biennale (Rio de Janeiro), the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Durban, South Africa), and Environmental Crisis: Art & Science (London). Awards include funding from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and an Art 365 Fellowship. She has spoken at venues including Design@Large, UC San Diego and Ecoartspace. Grothaus holds an MFA from UC San Diego and is a PhD student in Digital Media at York University (Toronto).

Stefan Helmreich is a professor of cultural anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research examines how biologists think through the limits of "life" as a category of analysis. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty. This book, winner of the 2017 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research, the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science, the 2010 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society, and the 2010 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from Society for Cultural Anthropology charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, and the possibility of life on other worlds. An earlier book, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) is an ethnography of computer modeling in the life sciences. In 2000, it won the Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association. Helmreich's newest book, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016) asks after changing definitions of life, water, and sound (and features a soundtrack). He is at work on a new book about wave science, in domains ranging from oceanography to cosmology to medicine to acoustics to social theory.  Helmreich's essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, Cabinet, and The Wire. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and has held fellowships at Cornell, Rutgers, and NYU.

Judit Hersko  is an installation artist who works at the intersection of art and science. She collaborates with scientists on visualizing climate change science through art and narrative. Her work is rooted in extensive research as well as in a playful exploration of materials and phenomena of light, shadow and transparency. Her current practice involves storytelling through performances that incorporate the objects she makes. Hersko’s work has received national as well as international recognition. In 1997 she represented her native Hungary at the Venice Biennale and in 2007 her work was featured in Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, curated by Lucy Lippard for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2008 she received the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant and spent six weeks in Antarctica working with scientists. She has presented extensively on this work at universities, research institutions, conferences, and symposia around the world and she has published several articles and book chapters, including in the forthcoming book by eds. Gregg Mitman, Robert Emmett and Marco Armiero, Remains of the Anthropocene: A Fragmentary History in 15 Objects, University of Chicago Press (2018). Hersko is a Professor in the Department of Art, Media and Design at California State University San Marcos, where she initiated the Art and Science Project.

Jesse Colin Jackson  is a Canadian artist based in Southern California. Originally trained as an architect and engineer, he works across disciplines and has pursued intensive collaborations with urbanists, designers, humanists, poets, anthropologists, and neuroscientists, among others. Jackson’s creative practice explores architectures—from buildings to landscapes to virtual worlds—through objects and images made with digital visualization and fabrication technologies. His interactive Marching Cubes installations and performances (2016—present) have been featured in Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Tehran, and Stockholm. Past solo exhibitions include Suburban Ecologies (Great Park Gallery, 2020) Skip Stop (Pari Nadimi Gallery, 2019), Radiant City (Pari Nadimi Gallery, 2014), and Usonia Road (Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, 2009). Jackson was a 2014-2015 Hellman Fellow at the University of California and a 2008-2010 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto. Jackson is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Art; the Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts; and the Executive Director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology. He taught previously at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto.

Falko Kuester  received an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1994 and MS degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1995 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2001 he received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis and currently is the Calit2 Professor for Visualization and Virtual Reality at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Kuester holds appointments as Professor in the Departments of Structural Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering (JSoE) and serves as the director of the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI), the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), the Calit2 Center of Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality (GRAVITY) and the DroneLab. Prof. Kuester is a cultural heritage engineer, working on methodologies and techniques for cultural heritage diagnostics and preservation, including diagnostic and analytical imaging as well as visual and cultural analytics techniques that provide engineers, scientists, art historians and restorers, with a means to intuitively and interactively explore historic artifacts. This research is creating the foundation for the development of digital surrogates of world cultural heritage sites and artifacts, providing a means for researchers and the public alike to study these artifacts and facilitate their preservation. His research interests also include tera-scale scientific data visualization, virtual reality and augmented reality, image-based modeling and rendering, robotics and layered manufacturing.

Jules S. Jaffe’s research interests broadly concern the development of new tools that will lead to better understanding ocean ecology. Early career work, resulting in a creativity award from the National Science Foundation, addressed the development of multi-beam acoustic systems that are still the only means to providing measurements of plankton behavior. Advances in the use of light sheet illumination for bulk measurement of fluorescent organisms as well as the use of this technology for microscopy were considered by Nature magazine to be a “milestone in microscopy.” In recent years, Jules' work has also centered on the creation of swarms of subsurface oceanic autonomous miniature robotic drifters. A well-received article in Nature Communications was followed by the oceanic drifters being featured in shows at the American Museum of Natural History and the London Museum of Science. The London Museum of Science acquired these drifters for their permanent collection. Over the last decade, Jules' lab has developed a next generation of diver-deployable microscopes that have successfully imaged coral in conflict with one another, as featured in the New York Times. Capable of showing detail almost as small as one micron, these microscopes are also used to measure photosynthetic dynamics and bacterial chemotaxis. Jules is also interested in outreach via the invention and promotion of a next generation of scientifically useful tools that are a result of the “maker” movement. Several articles accepted this year in leading journals document this work. Jaffe is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and has been a visiting professor or visiting scholar at a number of universities.

David S. Jones, MD, PhD, is the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology in the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. He is author of Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Harvard, 2004) and Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care (Johns Hopkins, 2013). His essays have appeared in venues including New England Journal of Medicine, Social Studies of Science, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science, and American Journal of Public Health.

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching interests concern oceans and the environmental humanities, contemporary American literature, media theory, science fiction, science and technology studies, and the relation between theory and practice in swimming and scuba diving. Professor Jue is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke University, forthcoming September 2021) with Rafico Ruiz, and Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, under contract) with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee. Professor Jue has published articles in Grey Room, Configurations, Women's Studies Quarterly, Animations: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, and Size & Scale in Literature and Culture, among other venues.  She currently directs the Center for Literature & Environment in the Department of English at UC Santa Barbara.

Stefan Llewelyn Smith is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCSD and at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is also a faculty member of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research is grounded in fluid dynamics and applied mathematics. In particular, he works on geophysical fluid dynamics, vortex dynamics, fluid-structure interaction and asymptotics, the study of methods for measuring properties of estimators used to compute indefinite growth or change. Asymptotic analysis is used to obtain a deeper qualitative understanding of quantitative tools.)

Lei Liang  studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. Lei Liang serves as the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music. A winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Xiaoxiang, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Lei Liang's recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America's complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs. 

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Her work includes Primate Cinema, a series of experimental videos exploring the primate continuum. In 2011, she received a major arts grant from the UK-based Wellcome Trust to make original videos to entertain captive chimpanzees. The resulting project, commissioned by the Arts Catalyst, titled Primate Cinema: Apes as Family, includes a single-channel (12m) and two-channel (22m) video installation. Primate Cinema: Apes as Family was selected in 2013 for Sundance, Berlinale, True/False Film Festival, and Transitio Mexico Festival of Electronic Art. The two-channel version premiered at Abandon Normal Devices and was featured at the Edinburgh Festival of Art, and won the Ars Electronica prize for hybrid art.

Scott McAvoy is an expert in 3D modelling, data processing and reconstruction, working in the fields of archaeology, oceanography, and medicine. He runs the Digital Media Lab at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library. He is known for his sea turtle prosthetic project, reconstructions of ISIS destroyed sites in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, and his ongoing data visualization and modelling work with the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology and Cyprus University of Technology's Digital Heritage Lab. Scott's unique focus on 3D digital formats, their preservation, and extra-disciplinary re-use has made him a leading figure in field of emerging library technologies and the integration of complex visual media with research data and archival infrastructure.

Danielle Mchaskell is a PhD student in marine biology studying non-native and invasive seaweed species. Her particular interest is in mechanisms of establishment within and potential impact on the native community within our local temperate ecosystems, focusing especially on kelp forests and the intertidal zone. She started her academic journey at Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) before transferring to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP) to complete an undergraduate degree in biology with a zoology option. At Mt. SAC, a foundational biology course sparked her interest in ecology, leading her to pursue undergraduate research during a REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and an independent undergraduate research project at Cal State Polytech that later developed into her master’s thesis. Successfully earning her M.S. and B.S. degrees as a first generation, low income college student can largely be attributed to the multiple forms of support from the RISE-MBRS-NIH fellowship. Danielle hopes to use the skills she learns in interdisciplinary research to pursue a career in academia.

Elizabeth Newsome, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, is the author of Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: The Serial Stelae Cycle of "18-Rabbit–God K," King of Copan (Texas 2010). She is a specialist in the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, including the Aztec, Olmec and Izapan cultures. Her research focuses primarily on the Classic Maya civilization that flourished in Mexico and Central America from the second to the tenth centuries. Newsome's studies have addressed various aspects of Maya architecture, stone sculpture and hieroglyphic writing, with active field research in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. She teaches and is conducting research on coastal and inland Native American art and material culture. Her disciplinary approaches emphasize iconological interpretation and the study of art in relation to cultural and intellectual history.

James Nisbet is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He works on modern and contemporary art, theory, and criticism, with special interests in environmental history and the history of photography. He is the author of Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT 2014), a book that traces a cultural shift toward the unruly complexities of global ecologies, and the forthcoming Second Site (Princeton 2021). With Lyle Massey, he is editor of the forthcoming book The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (California University Press, 2021).

Valerie A. Olson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her work as an environmental anthropologist explores the sociocultural dimensions of large-scale ecosystem science and governance in North America. Olson’s projects focus on how remote and largely unpopulated environments, like outer space and ocean subsurfaces, become important sites in the production of new ecological knowledge, technologies, and politics. She has investigated the social organization, economics, and transboundary politics of marine ecosystem restoration in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2012 BP oil disaster. In 2018, Olson published the first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight, Into the Extreme: US Environmental Politics and Systems Beyond Earth. This book examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. Throughout Into the Extreme, Olson focuses on the political ecology of outer space, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos.

Simon Penny is an artist, theorist and teacher with a longstanding focus on emerging technologies and on embodied and situated aspects of artistic practice. He has built interactive installations and robotic art since the mid 1980s. He explores - in artistic and scholarly work and technical research - problems encountered when computational technologies interface with cultural practices. His longstanding concern for embodied and situated aspects of aesthetic experience, along with a critical analysis of computer culture are the the focus of his book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). He was director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference UCI 2016, and An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017.

Joe Riley is an artist, researcher, sailor, and PhD student in Art History and Art Practice at University of California San Diego, where he also participates in the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research broadly considers how the oceans have long been a source of cultural and visual techniques that mediate the co-production of human and nonhuman worlds. Riley’s current work examines how the ecological declension of technologies—such as those deployed in maritime navigation, photography, medicine, and energy production—inflect human processes of extraction and production with environmental temporalities.  Riley was a 2020 Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy. He has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2016-17), Art & Law Program (2018), Interdisciplinary Art & Theory Program (2018-19), and was a student organizer with Free Cooper Union. Riley holds a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2013) and has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Alongside Audrey Snyder, he was a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship (2018-19) and Fresh Kills Field R/D program (2017-18). His collaborative work with the collective Futurefarmers has exhibited widely, including Artes Mundi 7 and Sharjah Biennial 13.

Ana Gloria (Martha) Rodriguez (Kumeyaay from Mat Perhaw) is a weaver, potter, and tribal singer and dancer. She was born and raised in San Jose de la Zorra, one of the five Kumeyaay communities in Baja California, which is renowned for its traditional basket weavers. Martha has taught courses in Kumeyaay basketry, pottery, and food at Kumeyaay Community College, as well as assisting with courses in language and traditional tools. In honor of the Kumeyaay people of Kosay Village (Old Town San Diego), she opened the Kosay Kumeyaay Market in 2021 as a space to support Yuman artists of the lower Colorado River Valley and Baja Norte, to give presence to the artistry of the Yuman group, and also to share Yuman culture with the public.

Stanley Rodriguez (Santa Ysabel Band of the Iipay Nation) is an educator, language teacher, maker of traditional boats, tools, and instruments, and a tribal singer. A member of the board of trustees and an instructor at Kumeyaay Community College, he is an advocate for his community’s culture and traditions serving in advising and teaching roles throughout San Diego and Native Kumeyaay communities. A US Navy veteran, he holds a doctorate in education jointly from UC San Diego and Cal State San Marcos, through which he researched and wrote about Kumeyaay language loss and revitalization. He has held an elected position of legislator for the Santa Ysabel Tribe of the Iipay Nation. He formerly worked as a Drug and Alcohol Abuse Counselor and now teaches full time about Kumeyaay language and the methods and culture he learned from his Grandmother and other Kumeyaay Elders.

Connie Samaras  lives and works in Los Angeles. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Working primarily in photography and video, she employs a variety of interdisciplinary frames and aesthetic strategies in developing projects. Her ongoing interests include: the variable membrane between fiction and real world; political geographies and psychological dislocation in the everyday; speculative landscapes and architectural narratives; science fiction genres and future imaginaries; the legacy of U.S. social change movements in a shifting global economy; paradox and the political unconscious; desire, popular culture, feminist and queer theory; art as historical artifact, the aesthetics of time, and differing systems of cataloguing history. In addition to an extensive record of art exhibitions, lectures, reviews, and awards, she’s also published writings, narrative and critical, on a range of topics.

Stuart Sandin is the Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. He is a professor in the Marine Biology Research Division, and he serves as director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Sandin’s research focuses on community ecology, investigating how organisms interact in complex marine communities. The majority of his work is conducted in tropical coral reef ecosystems of the Pacific and Caribbean. Sandin has coordinated multiple ship- and land-based expeditions to the remote islands of the central and south Pacific Ocean, with much work conducted in the Line Islands archipelago. Sandin has been using this island gradient and others to study the individual and interacting roles that local human activities and oceanographic context play in the fisheries dynamics and general functioning of coral reef ecosystems. The work in the Pacific has led to the development of the 100 Island Challenge research campaign. Learn more about this project at 100IslandChallenge.org.

Gabi Schaffzin is a research-based artist and designer and a design history scholar on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. Based in Toronto, Schaffzin holds a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice from the University of California, San Diego, an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Dynamic Media Institute, and a BS in Business Administration from Babson College in Wellesley, MA. His work has shown at venues including the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, and the IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht. He is at work on a book about design and computing history, drawing on disability theory to trace the design of graphic and computational pain scales in the 20th century. A recipient of the Andrew V. and Florence W. White Dissertation Scholarship from the UC Humanities Research Institute, he has publications in venues including the Review of Disability Studies and PUBLIC. He is on the organizing committee for Theorizing the Web, an annual conference and non-profit organization focused on facilitating discourse on tech between scholars, activists, artists, and more.

Jessica Schwartz  approaches musical representations and sonic histories of militarization and imperial violence, affective alliances, and creative dissent through historical, ethnographic, and theoretical methods. Her work dialogs with American studies, Pacific studies, environmental anthropology, and indigenous studies, and she has begun to collaborate on projects relating to musical activism, artistic expression, and climate change in the Pacific. Co-founder of the Marshallese Education Initiative, she is author of the book Radiation Sounds (Duke 2021). Other research interests include issues of musical transcription and analysis, critical pedagogies, race, class, and gender in respect to popular music from the postwar onwards and subcultural genres, such as punk and hip-hop.

David Serlin is a writer, editor, historian, and Associate Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, where he is also affiliated faculty in Science Studies, Critical Gender Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science. He also holds an appointment at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. His books include Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (2004), which was awarded the inaugural Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize from the Modern Language Association; Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (2010); and Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (forthcoming). He is a founding editor of the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and an editor-at-large for Cabinet.

Jennifer Smith is a Professor in marine ecology and conservation in the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. She received dual B.S. degrees in zoology and biology from Humboldt State University and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Hawaii in 2003. Smith’s research focuses on understanding the factors that influence community structure in marine ecosystems. Her research often goes beyond basic ecology by integrating conservation, restoration, management, and sustainability. While much of the Smith lab is focused on addressing pressing issues in marine ecology with the impending increase in human populations, lab members are increasingly interested in seafood sustainability, coastal aquaculture and habitat restoration.

Lauryn Smith holds a BFA from Cornell and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego. From Northern New York State and based in Ventura, she is a sculptor with a strong connection to craft and material form. Her techniques range from quilting, dyeing, and sewing to working in clay and wood. Her projects explore nature, water, memory, and movement.

Audrey Snyder is an artist and chef based in Southern California. Her engagement in these practices finds footing in seeds, soil, and sea-life. She has toured the United States by bicycle, sailed aboard Futurefarmer's Seed Journey, and was a chef with Doug Aitken's Station to Station project. Audrey received a BFA from the The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2013). She is a collaborator with the collective Futurefarmers and alongside Joe Riley she was a current participant in the Fresh Kills Field R/D program, a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship (2018-19), and participant in the Interdisciplinary Art & Theory Program (2018-19). In 2019, her project CAMPAGNA/CAMPANA/CAMPO was awarded first prize from the Rural Design Lab in San Potito Sannitico, Italy.

Alena J. Williams received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She teaches courses in modern and contemporary art history and theory; film and media studies; and the environmental humanities. Her research focuses on the epistemology of the image in art, film, and media with a long-range view across the twentieth century. Williams is currently completing a book on astronomy and experimental cinema’s intertwined aesthetic imaginary; her second project focuses on energy politics and the visual economy of work in early twentieth-century electrical science. A 2016 Hellman Fellow, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2017); a DAAD Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Design at the Universität der Künste Berlin (2018); and a Society Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities (2019-2020).

Pinar Yoldas is an infradisciplinary designer/artist/researcher currently based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work develops within biological sciences and digital technologies through architectural installations, kinetic sculpture, sound, video and drawing with a focus on post-humanism, eco-nihilism, anthropocene and feminist technoscience. Her solo shows include The Warm, the Cool and the Cat at Roda Sten Konsthall (2016), Polyteknikum Museum Moscow (2015),An Ecosystem of Excess, Ernst Schering Project Space among many. Her group shows include ThingWorld, NAMOC National Art Museum of Beijing (2014); Transmediale Festival, Berlin (2014), ExoEvolution at ZKM (2015),14th Istanbul Biennial (2015) ,Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts(2016). She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University where she was affiliated with Duke Institute of Brain Sciences and Media Arts and Sciences. She holds a Bachelors of Architecture from Middle East Technical University, a Master of Arts from Bilgi University, a Master of Science from Istanbul Technical University and a Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Los Angeles where she worked at the Art|Sci Center and the UCLA Game lab. Her book An Ecosystem of Excess was published by ArgoBooks in 2014. Pinar is a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts and a 2016 FEAT Future Emerging Arts and Technologies Award recipient.