David Sassoon is the founder and publisher of InsideClimate News. He has been a writer, editor and publisher for 30 years, involved with public interest issues: human rights, cultural preservation, healthcare, education and the environment. In 2003 he began researching the business case for climate action for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. BusinessWeek used that research to help it rank the Top Ten Companies of the Decade for emissions reductions and to produce a multi-part project that examined how leading U.S. corporations were responding to climate change. As an outgrowth of his research, Sassoon founded a blog in 2007 which has grown and evolved into Inside Climate News. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Abrahm Lustgarten is an environmental reporter investigating climate change and our response to a rapidly changing environment at the non-profit news group ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent work has focused on a great global migration in response to a warming climate. Other recent investigations include an examination of the global palm oil trade, the climate drivers behind pandemics, and global water scarcity. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and received the 2016 Keck Futures Initiative Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Lustgarten co-produced the 2016 Discovery Channel film “Killing the Colorado,” and has previously worked with PBS Frontline, including on the 2010 documentary “The Spill,” about how BP’s corporate culture of recklessness and profiteering led to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. That film was nominated for an Emmy. His early investigation into the environmental and economic consequences of fracking was some of the first coverage of the issue, and received the George Polk award for environmental reporting, the National Press Foundation award for best energy writing, a Sigma Delta Chi award and was honored as finalist for the Goldsmith Prize. Before joining ProPublica in 2008, Lustgarten wasa staff writer at Fortune. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired, Salon, and Esquire, among other publications. He is the author of two books; “Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster,” and “China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet,” a project that was funded in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Lustgarten earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003 and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cornell.

Maxine Burkett is a Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is also a Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at the non-profit Institute for Climate and Peace. Burkett is an international expert in the law and policy of climate change, with a specific focus on climate justice, climate-induced migration, and climate change, peace, and conflict. She is a Co-Rapporteur for the International Law Association’s Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise. She is also a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, the Lancet Commission for Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the American Law Institute. Prof. Burkett received her B.A. from Williams College, which awarded her the Bicentennial Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 2016, and Exeter College, Oxford University. She received her J.D. from Berkeley Law, University of California, and served as a law clerk for The Honorable Susan Illston of the United States District Court, Northern District of California. 

Jura Augustinavicius is an Assistant Professor at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University. Dr. Augustinavicius is also affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and serves as a Research Advisor and Lead on Climate Change at the MHPSS Collaborative hosted by Save the Children Denmark. She completed a doctorate and postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with special training in applied psychiatric epidemiology and mixed-methods approaches for use in mental health research and practice. Dr. Augustinavicius currently teaches on climate change and mental health. Her research focuses on mental health assessment and intervention among populations exposed to adversity in low-resource humanitarian settings and in the context of climate change.

Gary is Founder and President, Billion Minds Institute, Visiting Scientist, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and Senior Fellow, NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. A psychiatrist who approaches mental health as a building block of social policy and progress, he recently founded Billion Minds as a non-profit policy and “think-action tank.” The intention of Billion Minds is to link mental health to problems of great scale, specifically to the climate crisis, and to safeguarding sustainable societies through a humane social climate. Gary is the former Executive Deputy Commissioner in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene where he led the Division of Mental Hygiene and its development and implementation of the innovative NYC-wide public mental health initiative, ThriveNYC. Before joining city government, he was Medical Director for Behavioral Health across the Health and Hospitals Corporation of the City of New York. As Director of the NYU Program in Global Mental Health, Gary partnered with other groups globally to test and scale community-led models of mental health promotion and access in less resourced countries that are now widely used. A graduate of Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he also earned his undergraduate degree, Gary earned his MPH at Harvard School of Public Health and a doctorate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.

Parthiban Muniandy is a sociologist and faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. His teaching and research focus on borders and mobilities studies, urban studies, and displacement. He is the author of Politics of the Temporary: an Ethnography of Migrant lLfe in Malaysia and Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia. He is also the Faculty Director at Sarah Lawrence College for the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.