Speakers
Opening Remarks From
Michael Fitts
Michael Fitts is the 15th president of Tulane University. He arrived at Tulane in July 2014, bringing with him a strong emphasis on heightening cross-disciplinary education and research.President Fitts believes students and higher education institutions can set themselves apart in a fast-changing world and ever-shifting economy through the combining of different fields and skills. In his first year at Tulane, he launched task forces to lead the university in deepening its unique strengths for interdisciplinary collaboration. He sees powerful advantages in the university’s manageable size, its wide selection of professional schools, the unified undergraduate college and multiple cross-disciplinary projects already in place. He aims to create the most engaged undergraduate experience in the country through this rethinking of academic options, residential living, extracurricular activities and more. In graduate education and research, he will foster intellectual cross-pollination that can produce solutions to some of the world’s most fundamental problems.
Brian T. Edwards
Brian T. Edwards is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, where he oversees 35 departments and programs in the social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts—including 60 undergraduate majors and two dozen M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. programs. Prior to Tulane, he was at Northwestern University, where he was the Crown Professor in Middle East Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and the founding director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies.
As a scholar, Edwards examines the intersections between culture and politics, how ideas and attitudes about foreign spaces are formed in relation to cultural representations, and the ways in which contemporary American culture circulates globally, with particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He has done extensive field research in Morocco, Egypt, and Iran, and is the author of two books: Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke, 2005), a cultural history of how Americans came to think about the Arab world during the period when the U.S. was rising to global superpower status, and how Moroccans responded; and After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia, 2016), which examines the paradox of the popularity of American culture, especially digital culture, in the Middle East during the 21st century, while attitudes toward the U.S. were plummeting in the region.
Edwards has published essays, articles, and Op-Eds in a wide range of publications, both scholarly and mainstream, including Public Culture, American Literary History, Salon, Arizona Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Chicago Tribune, NOVEL, Journal of North African Studies, Foreign Policy, and many others.
His new research pursues two avenues: a vision for the vitality of the liberal arts for a post-pandemic digital age; and a multisited project on global port cities, with the collaboration of a multinational group of scholars, curators, and artist-activists based on four continents. He is also writing a book about Tangier in the 1990s—part-memoir, part-critical biography of Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, and Mohamed Choukri.
Edwards was educated at Yale University, where he received his B.A. in English, magna cum laude, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D., all in American Studies.
Hridesh Rajan
Hridesh Rajan is the Dean of the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane, overseeing a wide range of departments and programs. Before joining Tulane, he was the Kingland Professor at Iowa State University, where he served as the Department Chair of Computer Science. He also held the role of founding Professor-in-Charge of Data Science Programs from 2017 to 2019, during which he established the annual Midwest Big Data Summer School and led several key data science educational initiatives.
As an academic, Rajan is well-regarded for his contributions to Software Engineering and Programming Languages. He is the creator of the Ptolemy programming language, which improved modular reasoning about crosscutting concerns, and the Boa programming language, which simplifies data-driven software engineering. His research has been recognized with numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER award, the LAS Early Achievement in Research Award, and the Facebook Probability and Programming Award. Rajan’s academic influence extends through his editorial work with IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, and his advisory role with the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages.
Rajan’s leadership at Iowa State University saw significant growth in the computer science department, with increases in student enrollment, faculty numbers, research funding, and philanthropic support. He spearheaded efforts in diversity and inclusion, resulting in a notable increase in female enrollment. He also led the development of new academic programs, including the M.S. degree in Artificial Intelligence and the B.S. degree in Data Science.
Educated at the University of Virginia, Rajan holds a Ph.D. and an MS in Computer Science. He earned his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi. His professional journey includes a tenure as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in Bangalore, India.
Rajan is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fulbright Scholar, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. His ongoing research continues to push the boundaries of software engineering and programming languages, especially in making AI and ML-enabled systems more reliable and trustworthy.
Presentations Featuring
Sönke Dangendorf
Sönke Dangendorf is the Flowerree Early Career Assistant Professor in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering. Dr. Dangendorf has more than 15 years of experience researching mean and extreme sea levels, ocean tides, and storm surges and the impact on coastal flooding. He previously held positions as an “Akademischer Rat” at the University of Siegen, Germany, and as an Assistant Professor for Ocean and Earth Science at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Dr. Dangendorf was a contributing co-author to the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is currently a member of the NASA sea level science team. He was also co-author on the Sea-Level Rise Projections for Maryland Report in 2023. Dr. Dangendorf serves as an Editor of the Nature journal Scientific Data.
Joshua Basseches
Joshua Basseches is the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Environmental Studies at Tulane University. He received his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and spent two years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan prior to joining the faculty at Tulane. His current research examines the politics of energy and climate policymaking in the U.S. states, with a specific emphasis on the role of investor-owned utilities. His research has been published in peer reviewed outlets such as Climatic Change, Politics and Society, and Social Science Quarterly. His media appearances include the Boston Globe, Colorado Public Radio, and Vox in addition to local outlets such as The Advocate/Times-Picayune, Louisiana Illuminator and Louisiana Public Radio.
Robert Kopp
Robert Kopp is a climate scientist who serves at Rutgers University as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. He directs the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a National Science Foundation-funded consortium that advances coastal climate adaptation and the scientific understanding of natural and human coastal climate dynamics. He is also a director of the Climate Impact Lab, a non-profit research organization supporting data-driven approaches to estimating the social and human costs of climate change. Professor Kopp’s research focuses on past and future sea-level change, the interactions between physical climate change and the economy, the use of climate risk information to inform decision-making, and the role of higher education in supporting societal climate risk management. He has authored over 145 scientific papers and is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent (2021) Sixth Assessment Report. Professor Kopp received his Ph.D. in Geobiology from the California Institute of Technology and his undergraduate degree in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
Davante Lewis
Davante Lewis, born and raised in Lake Charles, LA, is a social justice activist who has dedicated his life to building people power throughout civic participation. He is a proud union member and former elementary school teacher. He works as the Chief Strategy Officer at Invest in Louisiana, a non profit think and do tank that works on issues for low and moderate income families in Louisiana.
Davante graduated from McNeese State University with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Communications. While at McNeese, Davante served as a two-term Student Body President, chair of the Louisiana Council of Student Body Presidents and a member of the University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors.
Davante was elected in 2022 to serve as Public Service Commissioner for Louisiana’s Third District, representing constituents from 10 Louisiana parishes, including the Baton Rouge and New Orleans greater metropolitan areas. He currently serves as the Vice Chairman of the Commission. Davante serves as the National Co-Chair of the National Utility Diversey Council Board of Directors. He serves on the Energy and Environmental Resources, Consumer and Public Interest, and the Regulatory and Industry Diversity Committees at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissions.
Donald Friedrich Boesch, Ph.D.
Donald Friedrich Boesch, Ph.D. is President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. A New Orleans native, he received a B.S. in biology from Tulane University and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the College of William and Mary. Before coming to Maryland in 1990, Don was a faculty member at William and Mary and then at the Louisiana State University when he served as the first Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, responsible for building LUMCON’s marine center in Cocodrie and two research vessels.
Don has conducted research on coastal and continental shelf ecosystems along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, subtropical Australia and the East China Sea. He has served on numerous committees and boards for U.S. federal agencies and for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, where he chaired the Ocean Studies Board. In 2010 Don was appointed by President Obama as one of seven members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Oil Spill and the Future of Offshore Drilling. Later, he was the Government’s key environmental witness in the civil trial that resulted in a settlement with BP for $21 billion, most of which has been used for environmental restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. In Maryland, Don was a scientific advisor to five governors and served on the state’s Commission on Climate Change, helping to craft key legislation to address the climate crisis by aggressively reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Through his role on the commission, he led a comprehensive assessment of climate change impacts in Maryland and regular updates of regional sea-level rise projections for use in adaptation planning.
Joshua Macey
Joshua Macey is an Associate Professor at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions. He is the three-time winner of the Morrison Prize for most influential environmental law article of the previous year. In 2023, the American Bankruptcy Institute named him to its list of 40 Under 40 Emerging Leaders in Insolvency Practice. He is also co-author of the 6th edition of the leading energy law casebook, Energy, Economics, and the Environment.
Professor Macey graduated from Yale College, the London School of Economics, and Yale Law School. He has worked at Morgan Stanley and clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Rick Luettich
Rick Luettich is Alumni Distinguished Professor in the departments of Earth, Marine and Environmental Science, and Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also directs the pan-university Center for Natural Hazards Resilience. He has an undergraduate and master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech and a doctor of science in civil engineering from MIT.
His research addresses water movement in complex coastal systems. He is a principal developer of the ADCIRC circulation and storm surge model that is widely used by the academic, government and private sectors for coastal flood hazard assessment under current and future climate conditions, mitigation design, event-based forensics and forecasting. He has led numerous coastal hazard studies as well as observational and modeling studies of coastal hypoxia and larval transport. He has published over 100 peer reviewed papers; has been awarded over $60 million dollars in extramurally funded research; and is often quoted in the national media regarding severe storm impacts.
Rick is actively engaged in the coastal science and coastal resilience communities, serving as the lead PI of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence since 2008; the inaugural-PI of the NOAA Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed from 2010-2018; a member of three National Academies study committees on coastal hazards (chairing the 2013-14 committee on Coastal Risk Reduction); a member of the Board of Commissioners of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority from 2012-2019 (vice President 2016-2019); vice-Chair of the MARACOOS Board of Directors; and as a member of numerous other coastally-related advisory boards.
Jesse M. Keenan
Jesse M. Keenan is the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning and Founding Director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism within the faculty of the School of Architecture at Tulane University. Keenan’s teaching and research advances the interdisciplinary fields of sustainable real estate and infrastructure finance and development. Keenan’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change adaptation and the built environment, including aspects of design, engineering, regulation, planning and financing. Keenan has previously advised on matters concerning the built environment for agencies of the U.S. government, governors, mayors, Fortune 500 companies, technology ventures, community enterprises and international NGOs. Keenan formerly served as the Area Head for Real Estate and Built Environment on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Fellow of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; as the Research Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate on the faculty of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University; and, as Visiting Scholar at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. Keenan currently serves as an elected Honorary Research Associate in Sustainable Finance at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University and as a Senior Economist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Hollow Tree Film Panel Featuring
Kira Akerman
Kira Akerman is an educator and documentary filmmaker. Hollow Tree,her debut feature film, won a Jury Prize for Best Louisiana Film at the New Orleans Film Festival, and Best Documentary at the Chicago’s International Children’s Film Festival. Hollow Treewas selected for the Sundance Institute’s 2019 Talent Forum, and was awarded several grants from the Sundance Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others. Previously, Kira directed and produced the short “Station 15,” (PBS, 2017), winner of an Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival and “The Reel South Award” at Indie Grits. Screenings included a Smithsonian exhibit, Sheffield Doc/Fest, The Climate Museum, the UN Global Climate Summit, and DOCNYC. Kira directed and produced the short, “The Arrest,” (“The Atlantic,” 2018). Screenings included The Camden International Film Festival, MOMA, and The Ford Foundation Gallery. Prior to directing, Kira worked on art departments, including a visual effects unit mentored by Doug Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey), and as a producer for commercials and shorts, including “In the Wake” (dir. Cauleen Smith). Kira consults for the educational nonprofit Ripple Effect, which is pioneering water literacy in k-12 education, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, an interdisciplinary, place-based institute, atTulane University. She received a masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s LDIT program (Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology).
Chachi Hauser
Chachi Hauser (she/they) is a writer and independent filmmaker. She produced the feature documentary Hollow Tree, which premiered at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival (Jury Award, Audience Award) and was supported by the Sundance Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Documentary Association, among others. Chachi has produced numerous short films including “The Rat” (2019 Sundance Film Festival) and was the associate producer on Netflix/POV documentary Roll Red Roll (2018 Tribeca Film Festival). She was selected for the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum, the 2019 Southern Producers Lab, the 2020 The Gotham Documentary Lab, the 2021 Holland Film Meeting, the 2022 Hot Docs Deal Maker Forum, among others. Chachi’s first book, It’s fun to be a person I don’t know, was published in March 2023 by the University of Nebraska Press in their American Lives Series. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Hobart, Prairie Schooner, swamp pink, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She’s the nonfiction editor at the literary journal Hunger Mountain and a Writing MFA faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Mekenzie Fanguy
Mekenzie Fanguy grew up ‘down the bayou’ in Houma, Louisiana, and is currently enrolled in Nicholls University, where she is studying business.
Annabelle Pavy
Annabelle Pavy grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana. She recently finished her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at Louisiana State University.
Tanielma Da Costa
Tanielma Da Costa moved with her family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana from Angola when she was six. She’s currently a dual major of engineering and French at Louisiana State University.
Jelagat Cheruiyot
Dr. Jelagat Cheruiyot is a senior professor of practice in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), School of Science and Engineering. Dr. Cheruiyot Joined EEB in 2017. Cheruiyot is deeply engaged in both academia and community engagement locally, regionally, and internationally. Born and raised in Kenya, she holds a Ph.D. in biological science from Auburn University, AL., where she studied the elemental defense in plants, joint effects hypothesis, and the trophic transfer of heavy metals. At Tulane, Cheruiyot has been instrumental in integrating service learning into her courses and everyday practice as a community member in New Orleans. Each semester she teaches a diverse range of students from freshman to seniors and graduate students, with an emphasize on community engaged projects such as community gardens, recycling, composting, ecosystem restoration and informed cultural participation. Her impact extends beyond the students and the classroom. She has guided fellow faculty members from different school at Tulane in incorporating service learning into their courses. She serves as a principal scholar for the Newcomb Tulane College Scholars Program, annually mentoring a cohort of sophomores interested in exploring food security, food justice and climate change. Outside of academia, Dr. Cheruiyot is active in the community, serving on advisory boards such as Glass Half Full, and board member at Glassroots. Her commitment to education and community engagement underscores her roles as a leader, educator in environmental stewardship at Tulane. Cheruiyot’s dedication to teaching and community engagement has been recognized through various awards including the Weiss Presidential Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, School of Science and Engineering Teaching Award, Newcomb Tulane Duren Professor, Barbara E. Moely, Service Learning Teaching Award. She also the Kylene and Brad Beers II Professor of Social Entrepreneurship Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking.