Collaborators

Dr. Maria Spiliotopoulou is the Manager of Student Learning and Leadership in the Sustainability Office at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.  Maria received her Ph.D. from SFU's School of Resource and Environmental Management; she is also an instructor in SFU's Sustainable Development Program. Maria’s doctoral research aimed to advance community sustainability theory by exploring the potential of urban productivity to holistically operationalize sustainable community development. She also has extensive work experience as an environmental consultant in Europe. 

Her publications include Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments, 5th edition.

Sara Scoville-Weaver

Downtown Phoenix Inc.

As a 4th generation Phoenix native, Sara Scoville-Weaver has spent the past 12 years focused on local community, small business support and economic development within the Valley. Most recently as Director of Business Development at Downtown Phoenix Inc.(DPI), Sara helped to revitalize Downtown Phoenix through company attraction and retention efforts and broad community engagement. A graduate of The George Washington University and Pennsylvania State University, Sara has degrees in GIS and Geography and currently runs community engagement and sales for the esteemed hospitality company, Conceptually Social. Most recently, Sara has been recognized as a ASU 2023 Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Community Fellow. 

Dr. John Dagevos is Senior Researcher and Research Coordinator at Telos, the Brabant Centre for Sustainable Development, in The Netherlands. Telos is part of the Tilburg Sustainability Centre of Tilburg University.  

Dr. Dagevos graduated in Regional Economics (cum laude) and is specialized in developing tools for the monitoring and assessment of sustainable development at the local and regional levels. In his research he combines his academic interests on issues of sustainable local and regional development with a strong belief in the necessity of bridging the gap between science and society. He combines analytical skills with a desire to find practical solutions for difficult societal issues.

Dr. Dagevos’s academic career has been largely at Tilburg University, but he has also worked in different institutes. He has wide experience as a manager, director, professor, lecturer, senior researcher and consultant. Dr. Dagevos has worked for various types of clients inside and outside the Netherlands: e.g. municipalities, provinces, ministries, the European Union, employers and workers organizations, companies, and schools. During the early years after the collapse of the communist system Dr. Dagevos worked, on behalf of the European Community, in the former Czechoslovakia (1992) and the Baltic Republics, especially Lithuania (1999), to help to build up a system of local economic development policies.

Dr. Raj Buch is the Director of Circular Economy Practice, and drives ASU’s efforts to provide solutions to the complex sustainability challenges facing organizations by linking ASU’s world-class researchers, with clients, funders and partners. He was instrumental in collaboratively building a hybrid, university-based sustainability solutions consulting practice at ASU, with applied research and solutions development work including developing systemic circular economy solutions at local and regional scales, building collaborative networks to advance circular economy, and building circular economy curricula for professional and academic classes and workshops. Raj is an experienced consultant with a demonstrated history of enterprise sustainability solutions development. During his 20+ year engineering and consulting business development career, he developed renewable and waste gas distributed energy solutions at Ingersoll Rand, delivering financial and energy efficiency value for clients, and engineering design and program management at Honeywell. His Ph.D. research focused on institutional energy systems, taking a participatory approach to strategically and systematically developing sustainable energy systems.

Cornelia Butler Flora, Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Sociology Emerita at Iowa State University and Research Professor Kansas State University, served 15 years as Director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, a twelve-state research and extension institute. Previously she was holder of the Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems at the University of Minnesota, head of the Sociology Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, a University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University, and a program officer for Agriculture and Rural Development for the Andean Region and Southern Cone for the Ford Foundation, where she initiated women in development programming. She has taught in Spain, Peru, Argentina and Uruguay. She is past president of the Rural Sociological Society, the Community Development Society, and the Society for Agriculture, Food and Human Her books include Interactions Between Agroecosystems, Rural Communities, Rural Communities: Legacy and Change (5 editions), Rural Policies for the 1990s, Sustainable Agriculture in Temperate Zones, and Pentecostalism in Colombia: Baptism by Fire and Spirit. She has over four decades of work on indicators of development around the community capitals: natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built, both in the U.S. and in developing countries. Her current research addresses alternative, resilient strategies of community development and community-based natural resource management in the light of changing socio-technical regimes and climate change. She was president of the Boards of Directors of the Henry A. Wallace Institute of Alternative Agriculture and on the boards of several organizations, CONDESAN (The Consortium for the Sustainable Development of Andean Ecoregion), the Midwest Assistance Program, the Northwest Area Foundation, Winrock International, and the National Community Forestry Center and the National Agricultural Research, Education and Economics Advisory Board of USDA.

Portland State University

Dr. Dave Kresta (PhD, MBA) is an adjunct professor at Portland State University’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, at Wesley Theological Seminary, and is a Fellow at Duke Divinity School’s Ormond Center. His research focuses on the role of faith-communities in neighborhood change, specifically to create sustainable, equitable local economies.  For over a decade prior to starting his PhD Dave was senior product manager for emerging technology at Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance.

Gretchen Ferguson

Simon Fraser University

Dr. Gretchen Ferguson has spent over 20 years in commuunity-engaged research and learning in Latin America and Canada related to sustainable communities, community economic development, indigenous economies and decolonization, social economy, and measuring the impacts of development projects and initiatives on indicators of social and environmental well-being.

Gretchen holds a PhD in Geography from Simon Fraser University, a Masters in Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia, and a Bachelor degree in International Relations from Concordia University.  She has taught in the Faculty of Environment at SFU since 2013.

Arizona State University

Caitlin Drummond is an Assistant Professor of Decision Science in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Her research examines how individuals understand and use scientific evidence when forming judgments and making decisions, with particular interest in decisions regarding sustainability and the environment. One of her major lines of research asks how individuals’ ability to reason critically about scientific evidence interacts with social and motivational factors to predict their usage of and trust in scientific evidence, especially on controversial scientific topics such as climate change. The overall goals of her research program are to illuminate the cognitive, social and motivational processes involved in evaluating and using scientific evidence, and investigate ways to improve science-relevant decision-making in environment and sustainability contexts.

Dr. Jennifer Vanos is an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She focuses on extreme heat, thermal comfort, and air pollution in her research, and examines health impacts on vulnerable populations, such as children and athletes. She is currently running numerous field projects in Arizona and collaborates with schools, government, and non-profits in community-based research.

Vanos is an active member of the Urban Climate Research Center at ASU and a scientific advisor for the Korey Stringer Institute. She currently serves on the executive board of the International Society of Biometeorology and is the chair of the Board on Environment and Health for the American Meteorological Society (AMS). She completed her PhD in 2012 at the University of Guelph in Canada and her post-doctoral degree with Health Canada.

Robert Boutilier

GERENS Escuela de Postgrado

Dr. Robert Boutilier is a social psychologist specializing in the social acceptance economic development projects. He has conducted strategy research and workshops on community engagement in over 20 countries and has measured the social license of over 60 mining, energy, and infrastructure projects. Dr. Boutilier conducts online workshops to help organizations understand the patterns of social capital in their stakeholder networks and develop strategies for combining capitals and resources for community development. Dr. Boutilier has published dozens of books, chapters, and academic articles. He teaches at GERENS Escuela de Postgrado in Lima, Peru, and is a visiting researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. He lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Melanie Gall is a hazards geographer studying the interaction between natural hazards and society. She co-directs the ASU Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security and manages the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS). Her expertise lies in risk metrics (e.g., disaster losses, indices, risk assessments), hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation planning as well as environmental modeling. The applied nature of hazards research allows her to work closely with emergency management agencies from local to federal levels. She has conducted post-disaster field work in Mozambique, Haiti, New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Her publications appeared in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Natural Hazards Review. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, M.S. from the University of Salzburg (Austria), and a B.S. from the University of Heidelberg (Germany).

Arizona State University

Darshan Karwat an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School at ASU, where he runs re-Engineered, an interdisciplinary group that embeds peace, social justice, and environmental protection in engineering. He is originally from Mumbai, India, but feels equally at home in Michigan or Washington, D.C. or Metro Phoenix. He studied aerospace engineering (specializing in gas dynamics and combustion) and sustainability ethics at the University of Michigan. He then spent three years as a AAAS Fellow in Washington, D.C., first at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the Innovation Team, where he worked on climate change resilience and low-cost air pollution sensors; and then at the U.S. Department of Energy in the Water Power Technologies Office, helping design and run the Wave Energy Prize.

Dr. Ali Kucukozyigit is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) at Arizona State University(ASU), where his research and teaching interests are risk management, project management systems dynamics, modeling & thinking, systems engineering, personal development (soft or life skills), leadership in VUCA world. His teaching portfolio includes undergraduate and graduate students in various modalities including in-person, online and hybrid. He is also involved in workforce development and upskilling for local and national companies in teaching project management, risk management and personal development.

He earned his PhD in Engineering Management and Systems Engineering (EMSE) at Old Dominion University.  His previous education includes BS in Systems Engineering, MS in Systems Engineering, MA in Leadership Development, International Relations and Organizational Management. 

Dr.Kucukozyigit is an active professional member of ASEM, IISE and INCOSE. He has been serving as ASEM Communications Director and voting member of Board of Director(BoD) of this community. He is also a member of the ASEM Industry Advisory Board (IAB). 

He holds CPEM certification from ASEM, SAP PP &M Functional Consultant certification from SAP and PRINCE2 certification from Axelos.

West Virginia University

Margaret Stout is Professor of Public Administration at West Virginia University. Her research explores the role of public and nonprofit practitioners in achieving social, economic, and environmental justice and sustainability. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to the field of public administration and governance studies.

Her publications include Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments, 5th edition.