This panel will focus on the university’s historical role in climate change science and the current political and social impacts of climate change. Featuring panelists:

Benjamin Iuliano (Undergraduate Student, Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity, University of Michigan)
Stephen Mulkey (President Emeritus, Unity College)
Theresa Ong (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Science Foundation)
Sandra Steingraber (Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Ithaca College)

Ben Iuliano is a senior at the University of Michigan studying ecology, evolution, and biodiversity, with a minor in food and the environment. In his time at Michigan, Ben has been a student activist affiliated with a variety of groups including Science for the People, the Michigan Student Power Network, and the U-M fossil fuel divestment campaign (Divest and Invest). During the 2015-2016 school year, he served as a student leader for Divest and Invest, overseeing campaign successes including the approval of a Faculty Senate Assembly Resolution and campaign endorsement by the Michigan Daily. Ben has published research on pollinator ecology in urban agroecosystems, and serves as the sustainable food, healthy communities program assistant at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor.

As a scholar of the interdisciplinary literature in environmental science, Stephen Mulkey is an active public interpreter of climate change and sustainability. His recent research focuses on the role of landscape carbon stocks in climate mitigation and on the academic structure of interdisciplinary programs in the environmental and sustainability sciences.From 2011 to 2015, he served as president of Unity College in Maine, a four-year liberal arts institution dedicated to sustainability science.

Theresa Wei Ying Ong, PhD, is a recent University of Michigan Ecology and Evolutionary Biology alum, where she worked with John Vandermeer. Currently, she is a NSF postdoctoral research fellow. She is broadly interested in theoretical agroecology, especially in the setting of urban gardens. Her work focuses on how biocomplexity influences the resilience of these agricultural systems to both ecological and political perturbations. Her scientific work has been published in Nature Communications, and in news outlets including Science Daily. Theresa has helped to organize many political and scientific events at U of M including the Climate Teach-In +50: End the War Against the Planet, the Early Career Scientists Symposium on Humans as a Force of Ecological and Evolutionary Change and the symposium in honor of John Vandermeer: Science with Passion and a Moral Compass. She is a graduate of the Frontiers Masters Program, an initiative to diversify the field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a proud member of Science for the People.

Biologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, PhD, writes about climate change, ecology, and the links between human health and the environment. Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from US cancer registries and was adapted for the screen in 2010. As both book and documentary film, Living Downstream has won praise from international media. A contributing essayist and editor for Orion magazine, Sandra Steingraber is currently a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

MC²: Michigan & the Climate Crisis is presented in conjunction with the Bicentennial LSA Theme Semester with support from: Science for the People, Office of the Provost; School for Environment and Sustainability; College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Bicentennial Office; College of Engineering, Rackham School for Graduate Studies; Center for the Study of Complex Systems; Institute for the Humanities; Ross School of Business; Joseph A. Labadie Collection; LSA Honors Program; Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; American Culture; Chemistry; Communication Studies; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Ecological and Evolutionary Biology; Ford School of Public Policy; Graham Institute; History; Museum of Natural History; Physics; Program in Science, Technology, and Society; Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies; Anthropology; Asian Languages and Cultures; English Language and Literature; and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.