Leadership & Institutional Roles
Chair, Templeton Conservation Commission (2023 - ongoing)
Director, Spatial Analysis Lab (ASAL), Antioch University (2025)
Faculty Assembly Member, Antioch University New England (2024-2025)
Chair, Strategic Planning Task Force, Environmental Studies, AUNE (2025)
President / Vice President, UMass Graduate Student Senate (2021–2023)
Chaired Child Care Committee; Co-Chaired Finance Committee
Represented graduate student interests in university governance
Professional Organizations & Networks
RISCC Management Network (2021–ongoing)
Synthesizes research for managers via biweekly research snapshots and challenge summaries
Coordinates engagement between scientists and practitioners through webinars and meetings
MAChapter Official & Web Developer, Society for Conservation GIS (2019–2024)
DEI Committee Member, American Society of Primatologists (2022)
Academic Committees & Conferences
Curriculum Committee Member, CoGLEE (LSSU, 2023)
President, Environmental Conservation Graduate Council, UMass Amherst (2021–2022)
Communications Coordinator, ECOGSS Conference (2020–2023)
Managed websites, created promotional materials, and coordinated with college administration
Manning Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Selection Committee Rep (2021)
Science Outreach & Community Engagement
Mentor & Volunteer,
AAG GeoMentor Program (2019 - ongoing)
URISA’s GISCorps (2019 - ongoing)
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (2019 - ongoing)
Public STEM Engagement
Organizer & Instructor, GIS Day Mapathons (2020–2021)
Instructor, Sound Bites Café – GIS for Middle Schoolers (2021)
Guest Scientist, “Lives of Scientists” – Shutesbury Elementary (2019 - 2020)
Scientist, Environmental Policy - Quabbin Regional High School (2005)
Facilitator, Book Group on Inclusive Dialogue (What if I Say the Wrong Thing?, 2019)
Teaching Environmental Justice to High School Students, including "love that dirty water" lesson
With science teacher Tara Goodhue of Greater Lowell Technical School, Josh Plisinski of the Thompson Lab, and Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology Coordinator Pamela Snow, we created a publicly available teaching tool for high school students that pulls together several real-world datasets into a graphing activity that guides students to explore future decision-making in the Merrimack watershed and its potential effects on drinking water. I created additional supporting materials for the watershed teaching tool, focused on racial justice, including the creation of an Indigenous land acknowledgement statement, a supporting resource packet for teacher use, and a companion high school lesson plan on human land-use and decision-making, adapted from a university-level lesson by HF Research Associate Meghan MacLean. Making this land acknowledgement for the data nuggets website inspired their team to include similar in all future lessons.
Alcorn, T., J. Plisinski, A. Suzzi. June 2021. Love that dirty water: Impervious surfaces influence on Stormwater Runoff. Data Nuggets.
Madagascar is a global biodiversity hotspot of conservation concern. Creating an accurate and updated map is imperative for conservation planning and natural resource management. My research group, Spatial Ecology & Analysis Lab (SEAL), at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is building a better map of the various systems in Madagascar that have an impact on the environment in hopes of helping to solve environmental problems.