Fara Warner is the executive director of Metcalf Institute, as well as an award-winning journalist and digital media expert with a passion for immersive storytelling methods. She is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the journalism start-up, A Picture’s Worth. Through her consultancy, Shokan Studios, she worked with for-profit and nonprofit firms seeking excellence in storytelling and editorial leadership. As the vice president of custom content and global content director of WSJ Custom Studios, she helped to build and lead the award-winning custom content studio of The Wall Street Journal. As editorial director of Aol Inc.’s Tech, Business and Entertainment Group, she oversaw editorial strategy for leading news sites including TechCrunch and created a new digital platform, This Built America, an immersive editorial project that explored the re-imagining of American manufacturing. She taught college-level journalism and is the author of the best-selling business book, “The Power of the Purse: How Smart Companies Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers.” She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in Journalism at the University of Michigan.

Lucia Priselac is the founding director of The Uproot Project, where she works with an advisory board to bring diverse voices to the forefront of environmental journalism. Prior to her role with The Uproot Project, Lucia was the special assistant at Grist, where she supported special projects and the CEO’s office. Lucia was also the newsroom manager of Global Press Journal, where she assisted with the operation of independent news bureaus in over 40 international communities. Lucia holds a master’s degree in international and European politics from the University of Edinburgh.

Luis Joel Méndez González is an award-winning climate change and environmental investigative reporter for Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism. He is a passionate, data-driven investigative and multimedia journalist with a strong interest in stories about Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised. His commitment has led him to collaborate with award-winning investigative teams such as the Miami Herald’s I-Team and El Nuevo Día’s Facts & Investigative Unit. He earned a master’s degree in Information Design and Data Visualization from Northeastern University.

Rachel Ramirez is an independent journalist, primarily covering climate change and environment. She was the climate writer at CNN for about four years, covering breaking news, trending stories and deeply reported narratives that helped CNN readers understand how the climate crisis affects all aspects of their lives. Prior to CNN, she worked for Vox, Grist and the Financial Times. She is also the co-founder of the Asian American Journalists Association’s Pacific Islander Task Force. Currently based in New York City, Ramirez was born and raised on the island of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory just north of Guam. 

Eva Tesfaye covers the environment for WWNO’s Coastal Desk. Before joining WWNO, she reported for Harvest Public Media and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. She was based at KCUR 89.3 in Kansas City, Missouri where she covered agriculture, food and the environment across the Mississippi River Basin. Eva was also a producer for NPR’s daily science podcast Short Wave. A graduate of Columbia University, she started her journalism career as an NPR Kroc Fellow.

Dr. Yoshitaka Ota is the founder of Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus, a scholarly network of ocean researchers who devoted their research to advance ocean equity. Dr. Ota believes that all ocean policy and intervention shall be ‘anti-inequity’, explicitly designed and implemented to eliminate systemic issues, such as racism, colonial legacy and gender discrimination through ocean governance. This conceptual core is stemmed from a mount of evidence that Ocean Nexus offers by the research and further the network find that any conservation and sustainability effort for ocean environment ultimately fails to deliver the outputs without addressing social equity as the outcome.

At the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Ota is a Professor of Marine Affairs. Dr. Ota graduated University College London with Ph.D. in Anthropology and worked in Universities and research institutes of UK, Japan, Canada and US as a researcher and professor. He has over 100 research publications, book chapters and reports. Dr. Ota has held the Professor of Practice position at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in University of Washington and have had various visiting and affiliate positions in US and Canada. He also has the Executive Masters of Public Administration from Evans Policy School in University of Washington.

Before his academic career, Dr. Ota also produced films and tv documentaries while appearing in a few films as an actor.