Angie Pepper (University of Roehampton)
Moderator, Session 4: Animals Affected by Climate Change
Angie Pepper is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (UK). Angie has written on the place of nonhuman animals in our theorising about global justice and on what we owe to them as a matter of climate justice. Angie’s recent work focuses on the normative significance of nonhuman animal agency; in other words, she is interested in what other animals do and why it matters morally, socially, and politically.
Astra Taylor (Documentary filmmaker and writer)
Speaker, Session 1: Animals, Pandemics and Global Health
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of What Is Democracy? and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. Her previous work includes The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, winner of a 2015 American Book Award. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective.
Aysha Akhtar (Center for Contemporary Sciences)
Speaker, Session 2: COVID-19 Research: With or Without Animals?
Aysha Akhtar, MD, MPH, is president and CEO of the Center for Contemporary Sciences, which is catalyzing the world’s transition away from unreliable animal experiments to innovative medical research and testing. She is the author of the book,Our Symphony With Animals. On Health, Empathy and Our Shared Destinies.
Crystal Heath (VetHarmony.org)
Speaker, Session 3: Animals in Crises
Crystal Heath, DVM is a shelter veterinarian and high quality high volume spay neuter surgeon from Berkeley, California. She is the founder of VetHarmony.org, co-founder of OurHonor.org and on the founding committee of Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown. A graduate of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, she also volunteers abroad to bring veterinary care to rural communities. Dr. Heath was recently featured in an Intercept article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, which uncovered––through a freedom of information act request of the United States Department of Agriculture, how the agriculture industry sought to discredit her and characterize her as a “dangerous animal rights activist” for her public criticisms of abusive corporate factory farming practices.
Claire Jean Kim (University of California)
Speaker, Session 6: Future Areas of Research at the Juncture of Animal Studies, Climate Change and Global Health
Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies and human-animal studies. She is the author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015) and numerous essays on race and animals. She was co-guest editor of a special issue of American Quarterly, “Species/Race/Sex” (September 2013), and co-organizer of the Race and Animals Institute at Wesleyan University in June 2016. She is currently finishing a book entitled Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World.
Clemens Driessen (Wageningen University)
Speaker, Session 3: Animals in Crises
Clemens Driessen is a ‘more-than-human’ geographer based at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands. In his work he combines a mix of approaches – drawing on archival research, philosophy of technology, multispecies ethnography, and design – to generate ambiguous stories about the ways animal and human lives are entangled. Often in collaboration with designers, artists and filmmakers, Clemens has produced several experimental interventions in the ways we imagine animal lives and human-animal relations. These include a video game for pigs, a documentary on back-bred aurochs, and most recently contributions to the exhibition ‘Countryside, the Future’ at the Guggenheim Museum NY. Recurring topics in his work are: in vitro meat, rewilding, robots, cows and pigs. Latest interests: beavers, agroecology, migrating birds, Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes. With PhD students he has collaborated on the ways wild boar, mountain gorillas, historical ducks and contemporary urban geese are entangled with human lives.
Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney)
Speaker, Session 6: The Future of Animal Politics in the context of Climate Change, COVID-19 and Movements against Racial Capitalism
Dinesh Wadiwel is Senior Lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies at University of Sydney. He is author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill, 2015). He is a member of the Multispecies Justice research group at the University of Sydney, and Chair of theAustralasian Animal Studies Association.
Elizabeth Baker (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine)
Speaker, Session 2: COVID-19 Research: With or Without Animals?
Elizabeth Baker, Esq., is the Pharmaceutical Policy Program Director for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nationwide organization of physicians and laypersons that promotes preventive medicine, especially good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. Ms. Baker works to modernize drug development to save human and animal lives by shifting nonclinical research from the use of animals to modern technologies that are more relevant to human biology.
Eva Meijer (Wageningen University & Research, University of Amsterdam)
Moderator Session 6: The Future of Animal Politics in the context of Climate Change, COVID-19 and Movements against Racial Capitalism
Dr. Eva Meijer works as a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University in the project Anthropocene Ethics: Taking Animal Agency Seriously. In 2021 she will start the four-year research project The politics of (not) eating animals at the University of Amsterdam, made possible by a Veni Grant of the Dutch Science Council NWO. Meijer is the chair of the Dutch study group for Animal Ethics, as well as a founding member of Minding Animals The Netherlands. Recent publications include Animal Languages (John Murray 2019) and When animals speak. Toward an Interspecies Democracy (New York University Press 2019). Meijer wrote nine books, fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages.
Irus Braverman (University at Buffalo School of Law, The State University of New York)
Speaker, Session 4: Animals Affected by Climate Change
Irus Braverman is professor of law and adjunct professor of geography at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY). Her research focuses on the relationship between law, science, and nature. Braverman’s books include Planted Flags: Trees, Land and Law in Israel/ Palestine (2009), Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Independent Publisher Award Winner, 2012), Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (2015), and Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018). Her latest monograph, Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet, highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what this transformation may teach us about caring for a diseased planet. Braverman is currently writing about the management of national parks and nature reserves in Palestine/Israel (Wild Legalities: Managing and Imagining Nature in Palestine/Israel, which is forthcoming with Minnesota University Press), about One Health and the medical posthumanities, and on ocean legalities. She has also edited several book collections and special issues, including on legal geography, gene editing and the environment, ocean legalities, and environmental justice in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Jan Dutkiewicz (Harvard Law School)
Moderator, Session 1: Animals, Pandemics and Global Health
Jan Dutkiewicz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School in the Animal Law and Policy Program. A political economist focusing on animal agriculture, Jan has published about food and food politics in academic journals including Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Gastronomica, the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, and Society & Animals, as well as in publications including The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED.
Jeff Sebo (New York University)
Speaker, Session 5: Animals as Drivers of Climate Change
Jeff Sebo is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, and Philosophy, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. He works primarily in bioethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics. He is co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (Routledge, 2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (Routledge, 2018) and author of Animals, Pandemics, and Climate Change (Oxford University Press, in contract). He is also a board member at Animal Charity Evaluators, a board member at Minding Animals International, an executive committee member at the Animals & Society Institute, and a senior fellow at Sentient Media.
Jo-Anne McArthur (We Animals Media)
Speaker, Session 3: Animals in Crises
Jo-Anne is an award-winning photojournalist, sought-after speaker, and the founder of We Animals Media. She has been documenting the plight of animals on all seven continents for almost two decades. She is the author of two books, We Animals (2014), and Captive (2017) and was the subject of Canadian filmmaker Liz Marshall’s acclaimed documentary, The Ghosts in Our Machine. Jo-Anne is based in Toronto, Canada and travels many months each year to document and share the stories of animals worldwide.
Jonathan Lovvorn (Yale Law School)
Speaker, Session 4: Animals Affected by Climate Change
Jonathan Lovvorn is Faculty Co-Director of the Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law & Policy Lab (CAFE Lab) at Yale Law School, which develops innovative legislative and litigation strategies to address animal, human, and environmental exploitation within the global food system. He teaches courses on animal law, wildlife law, and climate policy, and has published a number of articles concerning the intersection of animal law, environmental law, and food policy. He previously taught courses on animal and environmental law at Harvard, Georgetown, and NYU, and served as the Policy Director for the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program. He also serves as Chief Counsel for Animal Protection Litigation at the Humane Society of the United States, as Senior Legal Advisor to the San Francisco SPCA’s Shelter Policy and Legal Services Project, and on the board of directors of Well-Beings – a new nonprofit developing innovative solutions to protect animals, people, and the environment.
Josh Milburn (University of Sheffield)
Moderator, Session 5: Animals as Drivers of Climate Change
Josh Milburn is a philosopher whose research concerns political philosophy, animal ethics, and the philosophy of food. He is presently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, where he is undertaking a research project called Food Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. He is a member of the Research Advisory Committee of The Vegan Society and a section editor at the journal Politics and Animals. You can learn more about Josh’s work on his website at https://josh-milburn.com/, or follow him on Twitter @JoshLMilburn.
Kathrin Herrmann (Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing)
Moderator, Session 2: COVID-19 Research: With or Without Animals?
Kathrin Herrmann, DVM, DipECAWBM (AWSEL), PhD, is a veterinary expert in animal welfare science, ethics and law. She works at the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at Johns Hopkins University, USA, where she directs the ‘Beyond Classical Refinement’ Program. Her work addresses the reproducibility and translatability crises that science is facing. Together with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Kathrin co-organized and co-hosted the first US Summer School on Innovative Science Without Animals in June 2020. Kathrin initiated and co-edited the open access book Animal Experimentation: Working Towards a Paradigm Change (Brill Human Animal Studies Series, 2019), which features 51 authors who critically review current animal use in science, present new and innovative non-animal approaches to address urgent scientific questions, and offer a roadmap towards an animal-free world of science. She is also one of the three organizers of the Animals, Climate Change and Global Health webinar series.
Leslie Irvine (University of Colorado)
Speaker, Session 3: Animals in Crises
Leslie Irvine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also directs the Animals and Society Certificate Program. Her research focuses on the various roles of animals in society. Leslie has conducted extensive research on animal welfare in disasters. Her book, Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters, examines how our various uses of animals shape the risks they face in disasters—and the lengths we will go to rescue them.
Lindsay Marshall (The Humane Society of the United States / Humane Society International)
Speaker, Session 2: COVID-19 Research: With or Without Animals?
Lindsay Marshall, PhD, is Biomedical Science Advisor at the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International (HSUS/HSI). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in the UK and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Prior to her current position, Lindsay spent around 12 years at Aston University in the UK. As Senior Lecturer in Immunology, she incorporated a strong element of animal replacement in all of her teaching. She was winner of the student-led ‘Astonishing Academic’ award for three consecutive years. Her research programme during her time in academia was dedicated to the theme of human respiratory defences, where she ultimately developed multi-cellular human cell-based models of human airways. Her models of healthy human airways were used to examine the potentially toxic effects of e-cigarette vapour on human lungs, and she also created models of cystic fibrosis airways, which were used to evaluate possible treatments for infections in people with cystic fibrosis.
She is now the European Advisor for the BioMed21 Collaboration, an initiative that brings together scientists from across Europe, Asia and the Americas with a shared vision of a new, human-focused paradigm for health research. As part of this position, her key activities are to liaise with academics to develop critical reviews of animal disease models, and support HSI-HSUS public policy efforts through the preparation of targeted briefing materials for politicians and other non-expert stakeholders. In 2018, she reviewed the use of non-animal models used in respiratory tract disease research for a collaboration between the chemical consultancy EcoMole, Prof Ian Adcock of Imperial College London and the European Union Reference Laboratory for Alternatives to Animal Testing (EURL ECVAM). The ultimate aim of this research is to develop a freely available database of non-animal methods which scientists could access in order to help them make decisions regarding the use of these innovative human relevant techniques in their research. Other projects are creating databases for common human diseases like neurodegenerative conditions (such as Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease), breast cancer, autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular diseases.
Along with several academic colleagues, she is currently working on a project to produce an animal-free curriculum – creating educational materials that will allow scientists, students, lawmakers, funders and other interested parties, to design and execute their research projects without using animals, as there are currently few courses that help and encourage people to carry out animal -free research.
Marina Bolotnikova (Journalist)
Speaker, Session 5: Animals as Drivers of Climate Change
Marina Bolotnikova is a journalist living in Madison, Wisconsin (recently transplanted from Boston) interested in animals, ideas, and culture. She works as an editor at Harvard Magazine and has contributed stories to publications including Vox, Current Affairs, Sentient Media, Tenderly, and elsewhere; her work has also been taught at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Mia MacDonald (Brighter Green)
Speaker, Session 1: Animals, Pandemics and Global Health
Mia MacDonald is the executive director and founder of Brighter Green. She is a New York-based public policy analyst and writer who has worked as a consultant to a range of international non-governmental organizations – including the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, the Green Belt Movement, the Sierra Club, Save the Children, and several United Nations agencies, among others – on issues of environment, sustainable development, women’s rights and gender equality, reproductive health and population, and conservation and animal protection. She has published many articles in popular and environmental media, authored a number of policy papers and reports, and contributed to four books, including Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai’s best-selling autobiography, Unbowed. She is a Senior Fellow of the Worldwatch Institute and has taught in the human rights program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the environmental studies department at New York University. She is a member of the board of directors of the Green Belt Movement International – North America and the Culture & Animals Foundation, and has been a member of the boards of Farm Sanctuary and the Food Empowerment Project. She received a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a B.A. with honors from Columbia University, and also studied English Literature and Language at Oxford University.
Michael Greger (NutritionFacts.org)
Speaker, Session 1: Animals, Pandemics and Global Health
A founding member and Fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Michael Greger, MD, is a physician, New York Times bestselling author, and internationally recognized speaker on nutrition. He has videos on more than 2,000 health topics freely available at NutritionFacts.org, with new videos and articles uploaded almost every day. Dr. Greger has lectured at the Conference on World Affairs, testified before Congress, and was invited as an expert witness in the defense of Oprah Winfrey in the infamous “meat defamation” trial. He is a graduate of Cornell University School of Agriculture and Tufts University School of Medicine. Three of his recent books – How Not to Die, the How Not to Die Cookbook, and How Not to Diet all became instant New York Times Best Sellers. His latest book, How to Survive a Pandemic, was released in May 2020. All proceeds he receives from the sales of his books go to charity.
Natalie Khazaal (Georgia Tech)
Speaker, Session 5: Animals as Drivers of Climate Change
Dr. Natalie Khazaal is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow, who studies the links among disenfranchisement, media, and language. She is the co-editor of Like an Animal: Critical Animal Studies Approaches to Borders, Displacement, and Othering (2020, Brill) and the author of Pretty Liar: Television, Language, and Gender in Wartime Lebanon (2018, Syracuse UP). She is the founding faculty advisor for No Lost Generation-Texas, a student initiative for global refugee/migrant crisis relief efforts.
Shaina Sadai (University of Massachusetts)
Speaker, Session 4: Animals Affected by Climate Change
Shaina Sadai is a PhD Candidate at the Climate System Research Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds an MS in Applied Mathematics. Her research uses global climate models and regional ice models to understand how changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet could impact future global climate conditions as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increase. She is interested how these physical changes interface with social, political, and economic structures to create climate justice implications for humans and nonhuman animals alike.
Steven White (Griffith University)
Moderator, Session 3: Animals in Crises
Dr Steven White is a senior lecturer at Griffith Law School, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia). Steven has published widely in the field of animal law, including edited collections and in leading Australian law reviews. Steven’s PhD addressed standards and standard-setting for the protection of companion and farm animals in Queensland, Australia. He was a Farmed Animal Law and Policy Fellow at Harvard Law School in 2018. He is currently writing a book focussing on national, transnational and international approaches to farm animal protection standards.
Thomas Hartung (Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing)
Speaker, Session 2: COVID-19 Research: With or Without Animals?
Thomas Hartung, MD, PhD, is the Doerenkamp-Zbinden-Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology with a joint appointment for Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States. He holds a joint appointment as Professor for Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Hartung is the Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at both universities. CAAT hosts the secretariat of the Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC), the Good Read-Across Practice Collaboration, the Good Cell Culture Practice Collaboration, the Green Toxicology Collaboration, and the Beyond Classical Refinement Program. As Principal Investigator, he heads the Human Toxome Project funded by the National Institutes of Health, Transformative Research Grant. Hartung is the former Head of the European Commission’s Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), Ispra, Italy, and has authored 575 scientific publications.
Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University)
Speaker, Session 6: Future Areas of Research at the Juncture of Animal Studies, Climate Change and Global Health
Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He is the co-author with Sue Donaldson of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. Will and Sue are co-convenors of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics research group at Queen’s.
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