OUR TEAM
Alexa White
CO-FOUNDER
Alexa White is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation research, as an agroecologist and herpetologist, focuses on biophysical indicators of sustainable agriculture and international climate governance in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #2: to end hunger. Alexa is a Harvard Climate Justice Design Fellow, where she is engineering environmental justice screening and mapping tools for state and local governments in the Mid-Atlantic United States. She is also a Policy Entrepreneurship Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, where she works with the White House Council for Environmental Quality on environmental justice and sustainable development issues surrounding Justice 40. Alexa was given the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Conservation Leadership Award in 2020 for her research on food sovereignty and food justice and her important discoveries. Finally, as a 2022 Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellow, she is a storyteller who writes about all of these experiences.
Adria Peterkin
CO-FOUNDER
Adria is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Howard University and an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California - Berkeley she maintains a multidisciplinary vision for her research. Adria is a passionate advocate for the Just Transition and intends to use her formal training to actively inform and resolve issues of environmental injustice that impact local communities. Her experience in EJ began with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), an organization that started the HBCU Climate Change Consortium. She intends to continue her work, building upon the foundation that was instilled in her through family and community.
Meet the Advisory Board
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Dr. Beverly Wright
Founder and Executive Director at Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
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Ogonnaya Dotson Newman
Senior Program Officer at JPB
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Ansje Miller
Executive Director at Health and Environmental Funders Network
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Michael Green
Principal Consultant at Green Strategy
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Dominic Bednar
Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine - School of Social Ecology
Previous Agents of Change X Aya Joint Fellows
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Fellow
Dr. Candis M. Hunter is an Environmental Health Scientist with research interests in environmental justice, food accessibility, community engagement, implementation science, and children’s health to advance health equity and multisector partnerships. She received her BS in Chemistry from Spelman College and her MSPH with a dual concentration in Environmental & Occupational Health and Epidemiology from Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. She is the first African American to receive a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from Emory University. Her doctoral research explored behaviors to mitigate heavy metal soil contaminant exposures among community gardeners. Dr. Hunter serves as an Environmental Health Officer in the US Public Health Service stationed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is certified as a Registered Environmental Health Specialist/ Registered Sanitarian. She is passionate about community gardening, mentoring, reducing microplastics, and mixed methods research approaches.
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Fellow
As an environmental epidemiologist with a background in physics, Dr. Robbie M. Parks has diverse experience in large-scale multi-disciplinary quantitative research focused on climate-related exposures and public health. He is currently a NIH NIEHS K99/R00 Fellow at Columbia University, and will be an Assistant Professor at Columbia University in Environmental Health Sciences from Spring 2023. Robbie was a Columbia University Earth Institute/Climate School post-doctoral fellow from 2019 to 2022 with Prof. Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, and completed his PhD at the School of Public Health at Imperial College London with Profs. Majid Ezzati and Ralf Toumi in 2019. He graduated with a BA/MA (Oxon) in Physics from the University of Oxford.