Who We Are

Alexa is Vice President of Conservation, Justice & Equity at Ocean Conservancy, where her work focuses on identifying and protecting endangered & marginalized cultural landscapes for Indigenous, African-American, and Afro-Indigenous/Aframerindian communities. Prior to OC, Alexa was the Senior Regional Director, Southeast at The Wilderness Society; the Science Policy (SciPol) Program Director in the Initiative for Science & Society at Duke University. In 2017, she completed her Ph.D. in Environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment; she had previously completed an M.S. in Wildlife & Fisheries Science at Texas A&M and a B.S. in Biology at Howard University. She is an active member of the Ecological Society of America and the Explorers Club, and a founding member of the Equity, Inclusion & Diversity Committee in the Society for Conservation Biology. She is an enrolled member of the Saponi Nation of Ohio.

Luke is a member of the Monacan Indian Nation, and is currently serving as the Energy & Economic Development Representative to the Virginia Tribes for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He has been on the grant review board for the Native American Business Development Institute and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Living Languages Program. A graduate of the University of Hawai’i at Hilo (’11), Luke earned his M.S. from the Yale Environment School (’14), he is also the founder and director of NDPonics. As project lead, Luke is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the Onkyayun oheki project, as well as for the organization of land use and cultivation planning, as well as intertribal engagement and knowledge keeping.

Chetana served as a research analyst at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), where she authored/co-authored multiple reports and helped to guide energy policy. Since 2015, she has been a member on the board of NDPonics, an indigenous founded and led non-profit focused on forest conservation. Chetana was a 2013 EDF Climate Corps fellow at Southwestern Energy, where she worked towards benchmarking energy consumption at their Conway, Arkansas facility. She graduated with a Master’s in Environmental Management from Yale in 2014. Prior to her Master’s, Chetana worked with Cerana Foundation, a non-profit supporting environmental justice work in south India.

Varsha is a conservation scientist and Solutions Engineer at terraPulse, where her work fuses satellite remote sensing and socio-economic data to serve government, nonprofit, and community sustainability. Varsha earned her B.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the Duke University’s Nicholas School of The Environment, and she was a postdoctoral research fellow at The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). Her research on agricultural expansion and its ecological impacts has appeared in top journals and has been used for strategic planning by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), European Commission, and World Bank. She has also worked extensively to support equity & inclusion in the environment, with a particular focus on the unique role of land trusts in mitigating social inequalities and advancing equitable ecosystem benefits. 

Christy is a digital humanist, environmental advocate, and Ph.D. student in the Geography program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her dissertation research focuses on African American efforts toward cultural and political assertion in the Great Dismal Swamp region during the antebellum era as well as the attendant social and environmental costs of human/landscape resource exploitation. Christy uses Geographic Information Systems to observe to what extent digital cartography can inform us of the human experience while acknowledging phenomena deriving from oppressive systems in society threatening sustainable futures. She has been invited to share her work at a range of humanities centers including the Dave Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Digital Dialogues series, to name a few. She will graduate with her Ph.D. in Spring 2022.