Bruce Goldstein
Lead Weaver
Bruce is an Associate Professor in the Program in Environmental Design and the Program of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
His work is about how can communities combine forces to adapt to social and ecological challenges and foster transformational change. Bruce strives to develop close partnerships with the transformative learning networks that he studies, engaging skilled network facilitators (or “netweavers”) in the research process and providing them with research insights that can help them achieve their goals.
Bruce created the Netweaver’s Network to support these partnerships in knowledge coproduction, and the Brugo Lab research group.
Nick Graham
Operations Weaver
Nick coordinates activities and staff, providing strategic & operational leadership to advance the Transformations Community. He is building our community infrastructure, identifying how to meet the needs of the community of systems leaders, planning events, and supporting research on transformative leadership practices.
He is a nine-time startup and NGO founder with a passion for weaving social impact communities such as THNK and Catalyst 2030. He is Co-Founder of The Weaving Lab, which empowers hundreds of changemakers to weave communities and ecosystems for thriving futures for all.
He is co-author of the ‘Future Skills for the 2020s’ research project, delivered to education policymakers in 80+ countries, in partnership with organisations such as UN, OECD and WorldSkills.
Paul Chukwuma
Research Assistant
Paul Chukwuma is a second-year student at the African leadership University and also a holder of the prestigious Mastercard scholarship as a result of his work in his local community in Rwanda. He is passionate about data and research and has done lots of volunteering on climate change. He has led voluntary research for the United Nation where he mobilized a team and collected data from over 100 youths in Rwanda. As a result, he has been been selected to represent Rwanda in Qatar at the United Nations conference on least developed countries.Paul Chukwuma is a second-year student at the African leadership University and also a holder of the prestigious Mastercard scholarship as a result of his work in his local community in Rwanda. He is passionate about data and research and has done lots of volunteering on climate change. He has led voluntary research for the United Nation where he mobilized a team and collected data from over 100 youths in Rwanda. As a result, he has been selected to represent Rwanda in Qatar at the United Nations conference on least developed countries.
Thomas Haselbock
Community Weaver
Thomas is a social entrepreneur, community weaver, and strategic doer. He joined the Transformations Community in 2022 as the conference manager for the TC23 conference and currently serves as Operations Lead. With over a decade of experience in event organization, project development, and community-building, he has been involved in several initiatives and networks within the social impact space. His main interests include inner transformation, regenerative communities, and innovation ecosystems. Thomas is currently based in Spain.
Keezia Dotimas
Operations Intern
Keezia (Kee) traces her roots to Guam and the Philippines which both profoundly impacted her perspective on sustainability and regenerative systems. She is currently the operations intern for Transformations Community engaging in work that involves design, and project management. In her free time you can find her practicing yoga or reading a book on the lawn.
Monta Martinsone
Communications Weaver
Monta is a recent graduate with an MSc in Sustainability, Social Change, and Social Entrepreneurship from Linnaeus University in Sweden. Monta's work combines her two worlds - social impact and creative side. Her main focus is on strategic communication, social media platforms, campaign creation & graphic design. While studying Monta also participated in numerous Sustainability and Human Rights projects across Mexico and Brazil and was actively contributing to the NGO's efforts towards more fair & sustainable world.
Shane Casey
Graduate Student Assistant
Shane is a graduate student in the Masters of the Environment program at the University of Colorado, with a concentration in urban resilience and sustainability. Shane is interested in geospatial analysis, water policy, and sustainable development.
Kim Sensener
Research and Operations Intern
Kim has an undergraduate degree in Design + Change from Linnaeus University in Sweden. During her education, she built up and coordinated a local climate student association to push for climate action. With her multidisciplinary background in design, sustainability, research and political science, Kim is striving to contribute to a future beyond sustainability.
Interested in joining the team?
Carina Wyborn, PhD
Carina is an interdisciplinary social scientist with a background in science and technology studies and human ecology. She works at the intersection of science, policy, and practice, where she is interested in understanding how decisions are made in complex and contested environmental management challenges. Carina’s current work focuses on the science, policy, and politics of environmental futures.
Carina has worked in Australia, the United States, Colombia, and Switzerland, with government and non-government organizations on climate adaptation, wildfire governance, and biodiversity conservation. Carina was the research advisor for the Luc Hoffmann Institute from 2015-2020, where she worked on practices and methods to facilitate dialogue between diverse actors associated with complex conservation challenges. She co-lead the Biodiversity Revisited Initiative, an international collaboration that critically examined the biodiversity construct to develop a research and action agenda for diverse and just futures for life on Earth.
She is now at the Institute for Water Futures at the Australian National University, where she is working foresight practices and anticipatory governance in the Murray Darling Basin.
Joel Onyango, PhD
Joel has worked in research and management with a focus on science technology and innovation; climate change adaptation and mitigation; water quality, security, and access; food security, entrepreneurship and markets, and sustainable development. He has professional experience leading and participating in international research and development projects including the NWO funded inclusive low emission development initiatives in Kenya and Tanzania (i-LED) project; and ESRC funded Governing Sociotechnical Transformations in Agriculture, Energy, and Cities (GoST) project among others.
As a convenor for the Young African Scholars Academy at the Africa Sustainability Hub (ASH), his work is fostering research, capacity building, and policy engagement among early career researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Currently, Joel is involved in the conversation on governance of socio-technical transformations and inclusive low emission development pathways; and decolonising research methods for the global south. Joel is a deputy director under the Climate Resilient Economies (CRE) programme, at the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS); and a team leader for applied research at the African Researchers Consortium.
Karen O'Brien, PhD
Professor Karen O'Brien is a leading international expert on the social and human dimensions of global environmental change. She is based at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, and is a co-founder of cCHANGE, a company that bridges research and practice and supports transformation in a changing climate. She is leading a five-year project called AdaptationCONNECTS which explores the role of collaboration, flexibility, creativity, and empowerment in transformation processes.
O'Brien is particularly interested in the role beliefs, values, worldviews, and paradigms play in generating conscious social change, and this includes an exploration of the potential for "quantum social change." She explores these themes more deeply in her new book "You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change in Response to a World in Crisis."
O´Brien is deeply involved in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In early 2021, she was a co-recipient of the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for her contribution to furthering the field of adaptation and vulnerability.
Per Olsson, PhD
Per leads the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s research on Resilience Science for Transformation. His current research focuses on agency and systems entrepreneurship, social-ecological innovations, and transformations to sustainability. His work has been published in a variety of natural and social science journals, including Science, Ecology and Society, PNAS, TREE, Ambio, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Management, and the Annual Review of the Environment and Resources. In 2019 and 2020 he was recognized by the Web of Science as one of the world's most influential researchers of the past decade.
Per also works with change-makers around the world to strengthen their capacities to achieve transformative change that helps humans and nature thrive together. This previously involved co-leading the Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Program on Social Innovation and Resilience and currently involves serving as the director for the BALTICLEAD and the Transforming Change programs. He is also involved in facilitating interactions among scientists, policymakers, artists, business representatives, and the public, through a variety of initiatives, including co-founding the Coral Guardians.
Glenn Page
Interdisciplinary conservation scientist/practitioner with 28 years of program development experience building coastal and marine ecosystem stewardship. In 2001 he was awarded the title of "Environmental Hero" by U.S. Vice President Al Gore. At SustainaMetrix he leads an interdisciplinary team in ongoing consultancies in ecosystem science and research, policy, education, economics and multi-media communications. He has a long list of professional experiences building programs from the ground up and leading their design, implementation and evaluation. Glenn has pioneered methods for assessing the development and implementation of University PhD programs designed to promote interdisciplinary research funded by the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) programs.
David Manuel-Navarrete, PhD
David is an associate professor in sustainability at Arizona State University. He studies subjective dynamics in coupled social-ecological and technological systems and sustainability transformations. His most recent research explores adaptation, resilience, and transformation of water infrastructures in Mexico City, and the promotion of indigenous languages to advance sustainability in the Amazon.
Steve Waddell, Phd
Responding to the 21st century’s enormous global challenges and realizing its unsurpassed opportunities require transformation in ways of acting and organizing. For the past 35 years Steve has been supporting this through community organizing, consultations, education, research, and personal leadership. This has included leadership with the world’s largest community-based credit union and the Global Finance Initiative. He is currently Lead Steward of Bounce Beyond, a project in support of initiatives developing a new, emerging economic paradigm.
Dozens of publications include the books Societal Learning and Change: Innovation with Multi-Stakeholder Strategies (2005); Global Action Networks: Creating our future together (2011); Change for the Audacious: a doers’ guide to large systems change for a flourishing future (2016). Steve has a Ph.D. in sociology and an MBA, and is a Canadian-American living in Boston with his husband.
Paulina Aldunce, PhD
Paulina is an associate professor at the Environmental Sciences and Renewable Natural Resources Department, Universidad de Chile, and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation and resilience, transformation in a changing climate, and natural disasters management. She was a Lead Author of the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and, currently, of the forthcoming IPCC report, AR6. Also, Aldunce lead the Scientific Working Group on Adaptation of COP25, an event that took place in Madrid, Spain, in December 2019.
Chris Riedy, PhD
Chris Riedy is Professor of Sustainability Transformations and Director of Graduate Research at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. He is a transdisciplinary academic who draws on sociological and political theory, narrative theory and futures thinking to design, facilitate and evaluate practical experiments in transformative change towards sustainable futures.
Chris has a particular interest in the way that stories, narrative and discourse influence our social practices. His recent work explores ways to transform dominant narratives to support the emergence of sustainable futures. While most of his writing is academic, he has also written a short story as a hopeful alternative to the dystopian narratives of the future that dominate our discourse. A full list of his publications is available here. Chris also writes a blog on living within planetary boundaries called Planetcentric.
Susanne C. Moser, PhD
Susi is an independent scholar, strategist and consultant whose work focuses on adaptation to climate change, science-policy interactions, climate change communication, and psycho-social resilience in the face of the traumatic and transformative challenges associated with climate change.
Some of her recent work focuses on defining and measuring adaptation progress and success; evaluating programs that connect science and practice; and exploring the transformative implications of avoiding maladaptation through systemic policy interventions.
Susi has served as a senior advisor to the International Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability program (Phase 1 and Phase 2), and was happy to join and contribute to all but one of the Transformations conferences.
A geographer (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University) by training, Susi is the editor of two award-winning edited volumes, one on successful adaptation to climate change; the other on communicating climate change. She is a prolific writer, an inspiring speaker and has served on scientific advisory boards for Future Earth, the US National Research Council and contributed to IPCC, US national climate assessments and several regional assessments.
Veera Mitzner, PhD
Dr. Veera Mitzner is the Associate Director of the Future Earth US Global Hub. At Future Earth she - in addition to supporting the operations and growth of Future Earth in the US - leads the global coordination of the Future Earth National and Regional Committees and Structures and runs the organization of the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress series. Before joining Future Earth, she was an International Director and a Roman Macaya Hayes Global Science Diplomacy Fellow at the Global Council for Science and the Environment (GCSE), responsible for designing GCSE’s first international program.
Previous to this work, she held a competitive fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and worked for Rare, launching the European office and expanding the European development operations of this rapidly growing global conservation non-profit focused on behavior change and sustainability. Dr. Mitzner holds a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, and she has considerable academic experience in science policy and diplomacy, European affairs and history, as well as international relations. Through her scholarly work, she has been affiliated with Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku, and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her book “European Union Research Policy – Contested Origins” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020
Ioan Fazey
Professor of Social Dimensions of Environment and Change at the University of York, UK. Ioan is a Co-founder of the SDG Transformation Forum, Co-founder of the Tansformation Conference Series and Trustee of a change making organization called H3Uni.
He is transdisciplinary researcher, using a variety of science and social science methods and collaborate with economists, ecologists, educationalists, quantitative modellers, and others from the social sciences, humanities and the arts working at the interface of academia.
Ioan also works with those from policy, practice, local communities and government and non-government organisations on initiatives focused on achieving the significant changes in society and with challenges of the 21st Century.