BIOL 225: Biodiversity & Climate Change: April - Asian, Pacific Islander Month

Varshini Prakash is a co-founder and Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization dedicated to building a movement to address climate change. Her career in organizing around climate change issues began during her college years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she led a fossil fuel divestment campaign. The University eventually became the first large public university to divest from fossil fuels.

Dr. Ojima’s research areas include global change effects on ecosystems around the world. His research addresses climate and land use changes on ecosystems, carbon accounting methods for forest carbon sequestration, and adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change. His work on carbon sequestration involved direct work with the Clinton Initiative on Carbon Poverty Reduction project led by Dr. James Baker and led to a various interventions with Guyana and other countries associated with the project, and he is a consultant with the World Bank, US AID, and collaborative activities with ESRI.

Grace Lee Boggs was a social activist, environmental justice advocate, philosopher, feminist, author, and more. Boggs, along with her husband James, were notable activists in Detroit, advocating for issues surrounding the environment, civil rights, labor rights, feminism, and more through leading marches, supporting community organizations, and giving lectures on human rights. She also translated into English many of the essays in Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 for the first time.

Dr. Yiqi Luo is an ecologist with systems analysis and modeling. His research focuses on data-model integration to improve our ability to predict ecosystem responses to global change, aimed at understanding interactions and dynamics of carbon, nutrient, and water resources in forests, grasslands, and coastal wetland ecosystems. He is interested in how ecophysiological processes are manifested at the ecosystem levels and used to address issues in global change including terrestrial carbon sequestration and atmosphere-biosphere coupling.

Haunani-Kay Trask was a Native Hawaiian activist, educator, author, poet, and was most famous for her fight for Hawaiian sovereignty and Indigenous rights for Native Hawaiians. She helped lead 15,000 Native Hawaiians in a march to reclaim lands that the state held in trust. Trask represented Native Hawaiians at the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva.

Wei Ren, assistant professor in the UK College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, researches ecosystem monitoring and computer modeling to compare the impacts of climate-smart-agriculture practices used in corn and soybean production under various climate and soil conditions. The climate-smart-agricultural practices she will focus on are no-tillage and cover crops. She uses agroecosystem modeling and machine learning approaches to predict their short, medium and long-term effects on production and the environment.

In 1993, AIDS was the leading cause of death among people aged 25-44 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, unpacking the virus piece by piece, probing its genes and proteins until she had unlocked its genetic code and understood how it evaded the body’s immune system. It was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Joel Moribe is an endangered species biologist for the Pacific Islands Regional Office, based out of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. With more than 20 years of experience as a marine scientist, Joel is an Endangered Species Act expert, fueled by a passion to prevent species from going extinct and to put together strategies to recover their populations. Before coming to the Pacific Islands Region, he spent 14 years in the Pacific Northwest conducting project analysis for the protection of salmon and killer whales. He also spent 3 years with the Navy as an endangered species project manager.

Isabella Aiona Abbott, from Hawaii, was an ethnobotanist who studied Pacific marine algae. Abbott is especially known for her research on edible seaweed (limu), of which there are more than 70 types, and has been called the "First Lady of Limu." She authored eight books and over 150 publications. She was considered the world's leading expert on Hawaiian seaweeds. She was credited with discovering over 200 species, with several named after her, including the Rhodomelaceae family (red algae) genus of Abbottella.

Born in India, Aashish Manglik, a 2018 Pew scholar, lived in Saudi Arabia as a child before his family immigrated to Des Moines, Iowa. Manglik and his team developed nanobodies to recognize SARS-CoV-2 and possibly capture the virus before it can infect humans. This kind of treatment could be administered as an antiviral nasal spray to neutralize the virus or reduce the chance of transmission after a person tests positive.