Board Members
Justin Catanoso
Professor of the Practice, Journalism
Show Bio
Justin Catanoso is professor of journalism and freelance correspondent covering climate change and climate policy for Mongabay since 2015. He has reported environmental stories from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the US and Canada. He has worked as a communications consultant to CINCIA in the Peruvian Amazon since its founding, and co-teaches a summer study abroad program in Peru in tropical ecology and science writing with Miles Silman.
Dedee DeLongpré Johnston
Chief Sustainability Officer
Show Bio
Dedee DeLongpré Johnston is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Wake Forest University. She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Southern California with a concentration in entrepreneurial studies and a master’s of business administration with an emphasis in sustainable management from the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. She has over 20 years of experience in nonprofit management, primarily in the areas of education, sustainability, and the environment. Her past appointments include director of the University of Florida’s Office of Sustainability, where she was awarded the President’s Medallion, executive director of the non-profit organization Sustainable Alachua County, and US program director for Fauna and Flora International. DeLongpré Johnston served on the founding board of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and now serves on the association’s advisory and editorial boards. She also currently serves on the board of directors for the Piedmont Environmental Alliance.
Mark Evans
Area Chair and Dale K. Cline Associate Dean for Accountancy at Wake Forest University School of Business
Show Bio
Mark Evans serves as Area Chair and Dale K. Cline Associate Dean for Accountancy at the Wake Forest University School of Business. His academic interests are focused on the effects of financial accounting and voluntary disclosure in capital markets; financial accounting and reporting attributes; and corporate governance and auditing. He has been published in “The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and Contemporary Accounting Research”. Evans received a Bachelor of Business Administration and Masters of Business Administration from Radford University. He worked as a senior auditor at KPMG and an audit manager at Walker Healthcare before earning his Ph.D. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Prior to arriving at Wake Forest, Mark served as an assistant professor of accounting at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Michael Gross
Professor of Engineering
Show Bio
Dr. Gross is a Professor of Engineering at Wake Forest where he leads the Gross Lab. The Gross Lab studies the processing of solid state materials, particularly mixed metal oxides, for electrochemical energy conversion applications. The various facets of this research include synthesis, structural characterization, and thermochemical characterization. The Gross lab also develops multifunctional ceramic composites for solid oxide fuel cell electrodes, fabricating and testing the electrochemical performance of prototype devices. Finally, Gross studies activity-level, or situational, student motivation in STEM courses with the goal of directly applying motivation theory and empirical research findings to practical course design. Dr. Gross is the recipient of the 2015 Wake Forest University Teaching in Innovation Award.
Melanie Harris
Professor of Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology; Director of the Food, Health and Ecological Well-Being Program
Show Bio
Dr. Melanie L. Harris is Professor of Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology jointly appointed with Wake Forest School of Divinity and the African American Studies program at Wake Forest University. Dr. Harris is also the Director of the Food, Health and Ecological Well-Being Program. A graduate of the Harvard Leadership Program, Dr. Harris is a former American Council of Education Fellow and Founding Director of the TCU African American and Africana Studies program. Her research and scholarship critically examines intersections between race, religion, gender and environmental ethics. She is the author of many scholarly articles and books including “Gifts of Virtue: Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics” (Palgrave), “Ecowomanism: Earth Honoring Faiths” (Orbis) and co-editor of “Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: The Next Generation” (Palgrave) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Dr. Harris comes to Wake Forest from Texas Christian University where she served as Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as well as a Professor of Religion and Ethics. A former broadcast journalist, Dr. Harris has worked as a news producer for ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates. A community leader whose passion for education is linked to a commitment to social justice, she has also served as an educational consultant with the Ford Foundation, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Lilly Endowment Inc. She has served on the executive board of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and the Board of Directors of KERA-TV/Radio, the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. Dr. Harris has been awarded several prestigious awards and academic fellowships including the AddRan Administration Fellowship and GreenFaith Fellowship. Dr. Harris earned her PhD and M.A. degrees from Union Theological Seminary in The City of New York, an M. Div. from Iliff School of Theology and a B.A. from Spelman College.
Abdessadek Lachgar
Professor of Chemistry and the Bell Faculty Fellow
Show Bio
Dr. Lachgar a Professor of Chemistry and the Bell Faculty Fellow. His teaching expertise is in the general area of inorganic materials chemistry and nanomaterials. His research projects focus on the development and characterization of materials for potential applications in the field of energy storage and environmental remediation. Three main projects are underway in his laboratory, the first focus on the use of the molecular building block approach to the design and preparation of novel cluster based hybrid inorganic porganic materials for hydrogen storage and CO2 sequestration, the second is the synthesis and structural characterization of materials for use as high capacity cathodes in rechargeable lithium ion batteries, and the third project has the objective of developing solid acid base catalysts for the production of biodiesel from inexpensive feedstock such as brown and black grease. Lachgar has authored over 90 papers and has received over $2,000,000 in grants since he joined the university in August 1991.
Lauren Lowman
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Show Bio
The Lowman lab studies how spatial and temporal changes in water availability impact overall ecosystem health, productivity and sustainability. Lowman and Barros (2018, Ecological Modelling) – A prognostic phenology model is coupled to a land-surface hydrology model to determine how periods of intermittent drought affect canopy development during the growing season and impact carbon and water fluxes between vegetation and the atmosphere. Lowman et al. (2018, Remote Sensing) – The role of wetlands as a water store that boosts productivity during the dry season in the Upper Zambezi River Basin in Southern Africa is explored.
Stan Meiburg
Executive Director, Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability
Show Bio
Dr. Stan Meiburg is the Executive Director of the Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability after serving in the same role for the previous Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CEES) at Wake Forest University since 2022. This follows five years at Wake Forest as the Director of Graduate Studies in Sustainability and a 39-year career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Meiburg served as EPA’s Acting Deputy Administrator, the agency’s second highest position. Before becoming Deputy Administrator, Dr. Meiburg served in senior career positions as EPA’s Deputy Regional Administrator in the Southeast and South Central regions of the United States, as well as in EPA offices in Research Triangle Park and in Washington, DC. He received EPA’s Distinguished Career Service Award, EPA’s Gold Medal for his work on the Clean Air Act Amendments, the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the Department of the Army, and the Distinguished Federal Executive award, the highest civilian award for a Federal senior executive. He was a member of the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission from 2017 through 2021 (Chair 2019-2021), and is a member of the Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a Senior Advisor to The Water Institute. He also teaches in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest. Dr. Meiburg holds a B.A. degree from Wake Forest University, and masters and doctoral degrees in political science from The Johns Hopkins University.
Sarah J. Morath
Professor, Law
Show Bio
Sarah J. Morath is a lawyer, a writer, an educator, and a scientist. Her interdisciplinary scholarship on food and the environment has appeared in a variety of publications and is widely read and cited. She is the editor of From Farm to Fork: Perspectives on Growing Sustainable Food Systems in the Twenty-First Century (University of Akron Press, 2016) and the author of Our Plastic Problem and How to Solve It (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She teaches legal writing to JD and international students Wake Forest University School of Law.
Alan Palmiter
William T. Wilson, III, Presidential Chair for Business Law
Show Bio
Professor Palmiter is William T. Wilson, III, Presidential Chair for Business Law. He’s got a national and international reputation as a scholar-teacher on corporate/securities law. His primary interest is the “sustainable corporation,” with a focus on the implications of ESG investing and the importance of collaboration, friendship, teaching/learning, and love in the corporation. His articles have been selected seven times as among the best corporate/ securities law articles of the year. He has organized symposia on the corporation’s importance to the environment, for society, and in politics. Before joining the Wake Forest faculty in 1986, he practiced law at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton-Washington, DC. He was born in India, grew up in Bolivia, and went to high school in Toledo, Ohio.
Miles R. Silman
Andrew Sabin Presidential Chair in Conservation Biology, Department of Biology; Founding Director, Sabin Center
Show Bio
Dr. Miles Silman is the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Presidential Chair in Conservation Biology at Wake Forest University where he is also the Founding Director of the Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability and Board President of the Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónica (CINCIA—the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation). He has spent the last 33 years working in the wilds of the Amazon Basin and Andes to understand the diversity of the natural world, how it works and came to be, and how to conserve it. His current work looks at the relationship between humans and the natural world, conserving large areas of managed and wild land and ocean so humans and nature can thrive.
Julie Velásquez Runk
Director, Professor & Weigl Fellow of Environment and Sustainability Studies
Show Bio
Dr. Velásquez Runk leads the Environment and Sustainability Studies (ENV) Program). Velásquez Runk’s research examines the relationships between humans and the environment. She has three main focal areas: sustaining forests and nurturing human well being in mosaic landscapes; strengthening cultural and environmental rights and sovereignty; and incorporating multiple voices in holistic science and the humanities. Her scholarship takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to environmental studies, drawing from ecology, anthropology, Indigenous studies, public health, history, and geography. Ph.D. Forestry and Environmental Studies, Anthropology, and Economic Botany, Yale University and the New York Botanical Garden; M.E.M. Resource Ecology with graduate certificate in Latin American Studies, Duke University; B.A. Biology with concentration in Latin American Studies, Grinnell College.
Ron Von Burg
Associate Professor of Communication; Interim Director Graduate Programs in Sustainability
Show Bio
Ron Von Burg (PhD, University of Pittsburgh) is an Associate Professor of Communication, Director of Graduate Studies, and Core Faculty in both the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program and the Master’s Program in Sustainability. His research interests include rhetoric of science, public argument, public discourses on religion and science, sustainability studies, and science fiction film studies. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Southern Journal of Communication, Journal of Public Deliberation, and POROI. He works is the current director of the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute.
Ashley Wilcox
Human Centered Design Facilitator, Ally