Schedule and Events

Member and Tribal Elder of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Former Narragansett Tribal Council Member and Tribal Ambassador. Former Executive Officer for the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), for the United South & Eastern Tribes (USET) and for the Native American Fish & Wildlife Society. Principal and Chief Consultant on Aboriginal & Tribal Affairs for Nokasett, LLC consulting services. Board Member of Native Green. Environmental, human rights, and civil rights advocate.

Executive Director of NESAWG (Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group). Community organizer, water protector, and social and environmental justice organizer for twenty five years. Urban community grower, Master Gardener, and URI soil tester. Co-founder of Native Green; co-founder of Global Village Farms. Former executive director of two social and environmental justice grassroots organizations. Co-Founder of two architectural design and construction businesses. Popular Educator and Spanish-English interpreter and translator. Background in Architecture, Urban Design & Planning, Project Management, and Business Management.

Tim Lyons is a Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at University of California-Riverside. He is Director of the UCR Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center and the Wilber W. Mayhew Endowed Chair in Geo-Ecology. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geochemical Society, and the American Geophysical Union.

Lyons is the 2022 recipient of the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America and has been honored with visiting professorships and fellowships throughout the world. He holds a B.S. in engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, an M.S. in geology from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from Yale University. His primary research interests include astrobiology, geobiology, ancient climate, coevolution of Earth’s early life and environments, and the search for life beyond our solar system.

Linda Billings is a consultant to NASA’s astrobiology and planetary defense programs at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. She lives in Sarasota. Her research interests include science and risk communication, social studies of science, and the history and rhetoric of science and space exploration.

Anamaria Berea is an associate professor of computational and data sciences in the Computational and Data Sciences department and the director of graduate studies of the Computational Social Sciences program (CSS) in the College of Science at George Mason University, as well as the CSS concentration head for the Master of Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (GMU). She also served as an affiliate faculty and super mentor for Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an affiliate with the SETI Institute and as a research investigator for Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) and the Post-detection Hub at St. Andrews University. I have a PhD in Computational Social Sciences (2012) and a PhD in Economics (2010). In the past she studied communication as a complex system and my current research is on simulations of human behavior for space settlements and problems, and on information diffusion models for big discoveries in society.

Charles Blue has more than 35 years of strategic communications experience in science, engineering, and technology. He has served as the director of media services at the American Institute of Physics, science writer for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering, manager of communications for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, director of communications for the Association for Psychological Science, public information officer for the National Academy of Engineering, and the first public information coordinator for the American Geophysical Union. Charles earned his bachelor’s degree from Dickinson College where he studied Spanish and Geology. He received his master’s degree in Communications from the American University.

Charles continues to research the history of science and the connection between engineering innovation and science-fiction speculation. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Geophysical Union, and past president of the DC Science Writers Association. Charles also is an avid Irish banjo player, sea chantey singer, and fitness instructor.

Jaime Green is the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing and the author of The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.

Sunanda Sharma is an experimental biologist focusing on astrobiology research and currently supporting the SHERLOC instrument on Mars 2020. She aims to understand the limits of life and the detection of biosignatures beyond Earth. She is passionate about interdisciplinary research and practices bio-integrated design to promote discovery and understanding across fields and audiences.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon is a U.S. National Academy Kavli Fellow and received fellowships from NASA and NSF. A native of Miami, FL, she holds dual degrees in Biology (B.A.) and Music Performance (B.M.) from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music earned her Ph.D. in Oceanography at Rutgers University. She did postdoctoral work as a National Science Foundation Research Fellow in Biology at Arizona State and Harvard Universities followed by a NASA NPP award. Dr. Wolfe-Simon discovered an extremophile bacterium which can thrive in high levels of toxic arsenic leading to a ground-breaking announcement by NASA and heated controversy around the world for future implications of other life forms in our Universe. Her primary research interests include photosynthesis, astrobiology, geobiology, extremophiles, trace metal biochemistry, microbial elemental stoichiometry and searching for alien life right here on Earth.

Wolfe-Simon is an independent research scientist with a broad range of experiences and most recently built the 40,000+ sq. ft. biotech startup incubator Bakar Labs at the University of California Berkeley. Previously, she was the Chan-Norris Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Mills College teaching astrobiology and oceanography while promoting voices of young underrepresented women in the scientific community. She was also a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, and the USGS in Menlo Park, CA.

Martina Preiner studies possible transition points between geo- and biochemistry at the Max-Planck-Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. She is currently focusing on two things: organic cofactors as a missing link between the abiotic and the biotic and the influence of porosity on mineral catalysis.

Jason Dworkin works in the Solar System Exploration division NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as the senior scientist for astrobiology. He is the project scientist for the OSIRIS-REx mission and founded the Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory at Goddard where he studies organic compounds from meteorites and sample return material including OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2.

Rachel Funk works in Astromaterials Curation at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She works as an astromaterials processor specializing in sample handling and manipulation of astomaterials. She currently works with the OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2 collections. She is also the lab manager for both of those collections.

Pierre Haenecour is an Assistant Professor in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. As a Co-investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission, he investigates the compositions, microstructure, and abundance of insoluble organic matter (IOM) and presolar grains in Bennu samples. He is also the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Data Management Working Group Lead.

Hannah Kaplan is a research space scientist in the Planetary Systems Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center. She uses infrared spectroscopy to understand the composition of planetary surfaces, asteroids, and meteorites, with the goal of determining the distribution of water and organics in our Solar System. She is a member of the OSIRIS-REx science team and the Lucy L’Ralph instrument science team.

Paula Bontempi has been Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island since September 2020. Prior to her current position, Bontempi served as acting deputy director at NASA’s Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate of NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and spent more than 16 years as the physical scientist and program manager for ocean biology and biogeochemistry at NASA Headquarters. She provided leadership, strategic direction, and overall management for the agency’s Earth science portfolio, from technology development, applied science, and research to mission implementation and operations.

Her scientific interests include Earth and ocean remote sensing, phytoplankton ecology, marine bio-optics, studying the Earth as a system, the connection of ocean exploration to global economics, and the development of ocean sensors. She has a strong interest in mentorship and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) initiatives in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Her Ph.D. in Oceanography is from URI-GSO, and she holds a Master of Science Degree from Texas A&M University, and a Bachelor of Science from Boston College. She is from Upper Saddle River, NJ.