Posts in: Leadership in Action

St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church has flooded twice in the last decade: in 2011 from Hurricane Irene and in 2018 from Hurricane Florence. While the church rebuilt both times from flood insurance payouts, Minister Gerald Godette is counting the days until another supercharged hurricane sends waters up the Pamlico and into their sanctuary. Yet, with fe...

Bray Beltrán grew up valuing community health and well-being, and in his career, he has always gone above and beyond to center community impact. But it was only in the last few years that Bray really identified that as his purpose. Growing up in a muggy coastal town in Colombia, Bray talks about how he felt that he and his family didn’t have much. But he explai...

Practice is core to our work. Our trainings revolve around hands-on exercises and feedback in a supportive setting, and are unique in that the practice and feedback comes from trusted partners from other fields, such as journalism, policy, and community leadership. These experts work closely with scientists in small groups and one-on-one as they practice communicat...

Dr. Carlos M. De León-Rodríguez recently completed an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) post-doctoral fellowship with the Centers for Disease Control in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His research focused in developing diagnostic tools to differentiate between the Zika and dengue virus infections, which have similar early symptoms and are both mosquit...

Dr. Natalya Gallo is a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a 2017 Switzer Fellow. We first met Natalya when she attended our 2014 Ocean Acidification Communication Workshop as a graduate student, and worked with her again at our Ocean Acidification and Advanced Policy Training and during the Switzer Fellowship Training. The remarks below...

Dr. Allison Coffin is an assistant professor at Washington State University (WSU) Vancouver, where her lab researches sensory hair cell function and hearing preservation/loss through studying fish. COMPASS first met Allison in October 2015, when Nancy Baron, our Director of Science Outreach, led a two-day communication workshop for the WSU Center for Environmental ...