Dr. Mica Estrada received her Ph.D. (1997) in Social Psychology from Harvard University and now is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute of Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).  Her research program focuses on social influence, including the study of identity, values, forgiveness, well-being, and integrative education. Currently she is engaged in several longitudinal studies, which involve the implementation and assessment of interventions aimed to increase underrepresented minority student persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics careers (funded by NIH, NSF, and HHMI).   With the NSF Climate Change Education grant, she directs an interdisciplinary team, to provide learning opportunities to San Diego leaders about the changing climate. Dr. Estrada’s scholarly work has had two areas of emphasis.  First, her work is theory driven. Specifically, she assess how educational interventions result in greater integration into a community and increased engagement in the normative behaviors of that community.  She utilizes the Tripartite Integration Model of Social Influence (TIMSI; Estrada et al., 2011) to inform the design of educational interventions as well as form the basis of evaluation and research used to assess if and why educational interventions work (or do not work).  Second, Dr. Estrada’s work focuses on ethnic populations that are historically underrepresented in higher education, most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and have the potential to provide diverse and creative solutions to the pressing challenges of our day. As a leading scholar on issues of diversity and inclusion, she is currently serving on a National Research Council Committee. 
 

Dr. Werner-Washburne is Regents’ Professor emerita in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico (UNM). She is a molecular biologist who has devoted most of her career investigating stress response in yeast.  Her co-discovery that HSP70 genes are chaperones and her work on the genomics and cell biology of stationary phase led to the discovery of novel cell types in yeast and has provided deep insight into aging, the cell cycle, and other significant biological processes. She served as an NSF program officer for Microbial Genetics and wrote the first report on the Federal Investment in Microbial Genomics for OSTP in 1999.  Dr. Werner-Washburne has been on the faculty at UNM for almost 30 years and actively involved in mentoring students from diverse backgrounds. She is an AAAS Fellow, 2011 Harvard Foundation Distinguished Scientist, and has received numerous awards, including two Presidential awards, for research and excellence in science, engineering, and math mentoring from both Presidents Bush. Dr. Werner-Washburne currently directs the NIH-funded UNM-Initiatives to Maximize Student Diversity (IMSD) program for student research and is a co-PI on the model organism database FlyBase (Harvard and other institutions) and was SACNAS president and past president (2013-2015).  She has mentored approximately 600 students in her career. Her interests currently are mentoring, writing, and understanding the barriers to student innovation, creativity, and success. 

Qi Zhi, MPH is an epidemiologist and a junior Public Health researcher. Her key research interests lie in disaster preparedness and response, occupational and environmental health, home health care safety, household safety, HIV/AIDS, infectious disease, public health surveillance, public health policy, and global health. Currently, she serves as a project coordinator managing Federally-funded studies at UCSF and also as a lecturer at UC Berkeley online MPH program. She is passionate about healthcare and is willing to continue exploring various topics in public health and medicine.