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Dr. Dawn Wright is Chief Scientist at Esri, and a former COMPASS board member. Dawn is a globally recognized expert in marine geographic information systems and is also known as ‘Deepsea Dawn’ for her adventures underwater. Dawn is also the first Black woman to explore the ocean floor in the submersible ALVIN. After a major career transition, Dawn wrote ‘The ...

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...

"The staff are committed, passionate people who believe in what they are doing. You feel like you have a real partnership, and if you want to get fired up, they’ll get fired up with you"​ The news came as a surprise to Dr. Gretchen Hofmann: Her Antarctic field team was stranded at McMurdo Station because of the government shutdown. Then came anoth...

“I’m so grateful for the professionalism, competence, and knowledge of COMPASS. I felt like I had someone I could trust on my side.” Dr. Jenna Jambeck was exhausted, but happy. She had spent four days talking with reporters from around the world. Now the embargo on her latest research was lifted, and the headlines were hitting: New study shows plast...

“When you look at it on paper, you would think that our group really disagreed, but it’s so different face to face. Fire ecology is a discipline where there is a lot of back and forth. Those arguments at the beginning of scientific papers can seem so heated, but once we got into the room with the journalists, we realized that there were so many things that each...

“Scientists are under increasing pressure to show the impacts of their work. They need to be able to hear from people who are speaking to the public so they can understand what the story of their research is and why - from the public’s perspective - it matters.” - Geri Unger, Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology Scientific confere...