AGCI welcomes our newest Board members!
AGCI is excited to introduce the newest members of our Board of Directors: Raj Pandya and Richard Moss. Both are long-time friends and collaborators of AGCI, and we are thrilled that they are joining us in this new leadership capacity.
Rajul (Raj) Pandya is the Vice President of Community Science at the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Through his work, he invites everyone to be part of guiding and doing science, especially people from historically marginalized communities, so that the sciences can contribute to a world where all people and nature can thrive, now and in the future. Raj chaired the National Academies committee on “Designing Citizen Science to Support Science Learning,” is a member of the Academies Standing Committee on Advancing Science Education and their Resilient America Roundtable, serves on the boards of Public Lab, the Anthropocene Alliance, Community and College Partners Program, and ISET International, and was a member of the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment. He also helped launch the Resilience Dialogues — a public-private partnership that uses facilitated online dialogues to advance community resilience.
For many years, AGCI has been inspired by the vision for an inclusive and engaged science that Raj has championed at AGU, and we’re now lucky to benefit from that insight more directly.
For his part, Raj is excited to be working with AGCI in a new capacity as a Board director. “The community of scientists and practitioners working at the nexus of research and practice is at an inflection point,” he says, “where it’s starting to seriously integrate the community engagement needed to advance societal well-being. AGCI is at the forefront of those efforts, and I’m happy to be involved with them to further catalyze that movement.”
A senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Joint Global Change Research Institute and non-resident fellow at Princeton University, Richard Moss’s research focuses on risk and resilience in coupled human-Earth systems, highlighting how human responses shape and are shaped by evolving environmental and socioeconomic conditions. In addition to his academic work, Richard has also held public service positions with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations Foundation. Richard’s involvement with AGCI includes chairing the convening committee of the Science for Climate Action Network (SCAN), a national network of leading scientists and practitioners who apply science to support climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience solutions. Since 1995, he has planned and participated in numerous AGCI workshops, most recently co-organizing Navigating the Clean Energy Transition in a Changing Climate. He also documented the first 25 years of AGCI’s contributions to the enterprise of global change research, along with co-author Jerry Meehl.
We’re excited to have someone with such a deep grounding in AGCI’s history help chart the Institute’s future directions. “AGCI has had an outsized impact on the evolution of global change research into an increasingly transdisciplinary endeavor that informs society’s quest for sustainable and just pathways to sustainability,” says Richard. “Serving on the Board is an opportunity for me to continue learning from the interdisciplinary groups of scientists and stakeholders AGCI convenes — and, I hope, a way to give something back to an organization that has contributed so much to me and the field.”
We are grateful to have such talented and committed individuals join our board, and we look forward to working with them to further AGCI’s mission. Please join us in welcoming Richard and Raj to the AGCI Board!