Rise Up Boston: A Climate Event

Katharine Wilkinson. Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is an author, strategist, teacher, and one of 15 “women who will save the world,” according to Time magazine. Her books on climate include the bestselling anthology All We Can Save, The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and Between God & Green. She is co-founder and executive director of The All We Can Save Project, cultivating climate leadership and engagement; co-host of the podcast A Matter of Degrees; and creator of All We Can Save Circles and Climate Wayfinding. Previously, she was the principal writer and editor-in-chief at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. Dr. Wilkinson speaks widely, including a popular TED Talk on climate and gender equality that has more than 2 million views. Her writing and perspective have been featured by CNN, The New York Times, Time, the TODAY Show, The Washington Post, and many others. A former Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Wilkinson holds a doctorate in geography and environment from Oxford.

Sara Beery. Dr. Sara Beery is an assistant professor at MIT EECS’ Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL, and was previously a visiting researcher at Google working on Auto Arborist. She’s always loved the natural world, and has seen a growing need for technology-based approaches to conservation and sustainability challenges. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations that lead to domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona, where she received the Amori Doctoral Prize for my dissertation. She is honored to be awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Grant, a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, Google, Microsoft, IBM, the USAF, MIT J-WAFS, and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.

Melissa Hoffer. Melissa Hoffer is Massachusetts’ first-ever climate chief. She joined the Biden Administration as a Day 1 political appointee, serving as the acting general counsel and principal deputy general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency. She led the EPA’s Office of General Counsel through the transition until November 2021, and continued to serve as Principal Deputy General Counsel. Prior to that, she worked in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office as chief of the Environmental Protection Division beginning in 2012 and was named chief of AG Healey’s newly formed Energy and Environment Bureau in 2015. Prior to joining the Attorney General’s Office, Hoffer held senior roles at the Conservation Law Foundation and practiced for many years as a litigator and environmental lawyer at WilmerHale.

Alex Creely. Alex Creely is a scientist and engineer on a quest for clean energy. He is currently the Chief Engineer for ARC Conceptual Design at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based company working toward clean fusion energy. Alex has been at CFS since 2019 after starting as lucky number 13 at the company. Alex has worked on fusion projects around the world and is optimistic about a future in which the world runs on clean energy.

Alex Evans. Dr. Evans joined the Blue Hill Observatory following more than a decade in academic and national science leadership roles. He is the Founder and Principal Investigator of LunaSCOPE, a NASA-funded research initiative focused on lunar science and exploration strategy. He has served in senior advisory capacities for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, helping shape national priorities in space science and exploration. His work has emphasized interdisciplinary research, long-term data stewardship, and translating scientific insight into decision-making frameworks.