Michaela Barnett Bio:
Michaela Barnett, PhD is the founder of KnoxFill, a zero waste refillery in Knoxville, Tennessee. She received her PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Virginia, where her research focused on waste behaviors. Previously, she worked in university recycling and as an outdoor educator abroad. Michaela has a B.S. from Furman University, where she studied sustainability science and Spanish.
Michaela also writes about waste, sustainability, and behavioral science for popular audiences. Her writing has appeared in Gizmodo’s Earther, MIT Sloan Management Review, Behavioral Scientist, Alluvian, and others.
Leidy Klotz Bio:
Leidy's scholarship merging engineering and social science for a more sustainable and resilient built environment has been consistently funded, including through an NSF CAREER award and through one of the first awards through NSF’s interdisciplinary INSPIRE program. He also played a lead role in programs, funded by grants from NSF and the Department of Education, which support cohorts of graduate students on interdisciplinary research in a more resilient and sustainable built environment. Since 2012, he has advised 11 Ph.D. graduates (ten from groups underrepresented in engineering) and eight graduates of his research team have secured faculty positions.
Leidy has twice been selected by students as top teacher in his department and twice recognized for individual mentoring of top undergraduates.
Before becoming an academic, Leidy worked managing the design and construction of building projects in New Jersey and before that he played professional soccer for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds.
Patrick I. Hancock Bio:
Patrick I. Hancock is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research focuses on developing collaborative and behaviorally informed engineering practices that facilitate processes and generate outcomes that meet community definitions of social justice. Patrick’s work has appeared in Nature Sustainability, American Psychologist and iScience.
Shahzeen Attari Bio:
Shahzeen Attari’s research integrates psychological and environmental science to address challenges related to resource management and climate change.
Attari is a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Among her awards, she was named an Indiana University Bicentennial Professor and she received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to support her work.
Attari earned a BS in Engineering Physics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a joint PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering & Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She was trained in statistics and psychology as a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University.