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The Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program At the University of Washington
  • The Program
    • First Summer Experience
    • Second Summer Internships
    • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Conservation Summit 2023
  • Staff
  • Partners
  • Sponsors
  • Scholars

Staff

Meet the team behind DDCSP@UW.

2023 Instructional Staff

Melissa Mark

Director of Conservation Programming

Angela Burlile

Program Coordinator & Learning Facilitator

Martha Groom

Faculty Lead

Meera Lee Sethi

Internship Coordinator

Faustino Hampson-Medina

Program Assistant

Carolyn Finney

Visiting Instructor - Storytelling Mentor; Geography and Communications

Evaluation Team & Education Advisors

Carrie Tzou

Educational Research Team

Nini Hayes

Educational Research Team

Megan Bang

Educational Research Team

Mario Guerra

Evaluation Team

Previous Instructional Staff

DDCSP@UW is grateful to every staff member who has shaped and impacted the work we do today.

Brett Ramey

Director

Anam Mehta

Logistics Coordinator

Faustino Hampson-Medina

Program Assistant

Mark Arenas

Program Coordinator

Marlen Paredes

Program Assistant

Sam Battles

Program Assistant

Brittany Amaral

Program Assistant

V Espitia

Program Assistant

Nancy Woo

Program Coordinator

Amy Sanchez

Program Coordinator

Alicia Highland

Learning Facilitator

Melissa K. Watkinson

Environmental Outreach Specialist

Adrienne Hampton

Program Coordinator

José Ochoa

Classroom in the Field Teaching Assistant

Carolina Gomez-Posada

Classroom in the Field Instructor

Kirsten Rowell

Director & Co-PI

Carolyn Finney

Visiting Instructor - Storytelling Mentor; Geography and Communications

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Visiting Instructor - Communications

Kiki Jenkins

Visiting Instructor

Sean Watts

Founding Director

Support the Conservation Scholars Program

The Conservation Scholars Fund directly supports students who are pursuing a career in conservation through the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington. Effective conservation strategies are inclusive, involving a diversity of stakeholders and incorporating multiple values. Yet, the conservation community does not reflect the collective voice of our country. Without a significant, serious and immediate increase in diversity and inclusion, the conservation community will become a movement of the past instead of a guiding principle of the future. Our program aims to change that.

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Melissa Mark
Director of Conservation Programming
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Melissa Mark (she/hers) was born in California to a first-generation Peruvian mother and an Anglo American father. She has lived in California, Alaska, New York, Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Arizona, and now Washington. She graduated UC Santa Cruz where she studied Psychobiology and Theater Arts. She completed her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, followed by a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University, during which she conducted research on birds living on shade coffee farms in Nicaragua. She also engaged in community-driven research projects and capacity-building to support the development of avian tourism in rural coffee-growing regions, and served as a Nicaragua Fulbright Scholar developing place-based environmental education curriculum. Melissa continues to engage in research on avian ecology and evolution, as well as on the socio-ecological impacts of climate change on coffee farms in Latin America. Prior to joining DDCSP@UW in 2020, she led the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at Northern Arizona University for four years. Melissa enjoys providing transformative experiences for scholars through the exploration and practice of inclusive conservation.

Angela Burlile
Program Coordinator & Learning Facilitator
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Angela Burlile (pronouns she/her) was born in South Korea and raised in the beautiful mountains surrounding the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska. Upon completing her degree at Western Washington University in Political Science, Angela moved back to South Korea and spent six years teaching. Returning to Washington in 2015, Angela attended the North Cascades Institute Graduate Residency Program through Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University. She graduated with a M.Ed. in Environmental Education and certificates in Nonprofit Leadership and Administration and Northwest Natural History. During her time in graduate school, Angela was struck by the homogeneity that persists in the environmental education profession and turned to social justice education to understand and identify processes through which structural inequities are maintained, reproduced, challenged, and transformed in the environmental field. Joining the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington in April 2018, Angela remains energized and inspired by the community she has found with staff and scholars.

Martha Groom
Faculty Lead
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Martha Groom is a long-term resident of western Washington, often a caregiver as a mother, spouse and daughter, and a professor of biodiversity conservation at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell and the College of the Environment at the UW. Martha is one of the co-founders of DDCSP@UW, and serves as an anchor for all the cohorts of conservation scholars. She is active in the education and equity, inclusion and diversity committees of the Society for Conservation Biology. Martha is the lead author and editor of the text Principles of Conservation Biology, 2006, and is fascinated by the complexities of conservation education and mentorship in environmental studies. In addition to education research, she collaborates in landscape-scale studies of sustainability of coffee production and urban community gardens, and seeks additional means to simultaneously improve wildlife populations and human welfare. She is currently working on developing open-access curricula for teaching about energy justice in the age of climate change, and about biocultural conservation based on her years of teaching and experiences with DDCSP.

Meera Lee Sethi
Internship Coordinator

Meera Lee Sethi (she/her) has lived many lives, in all of which she has been driven by a desire to better understand the world and its human and non-human inhabitants. She is a community ecologist whose interests revolve around how climate change affects the relationships between plants and insects, how people form lasting relationships with nature, and how to create more just and equitable communities of science. She is currently working with the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington (UW) to study the ways in which hosting undergraduate scholars from diverse backgrounds can impact workplace culture and catalyze change within conservation organizations.

Meera is also an adjunct instructor of ecology and environmental sciences. She has a Ph.D in Biology from UW (2021) and a Masters in Children’s Literature and Teaching from Simmons College (2004).

Faustino Hampson-Medina
Program Assistant

Faustino (Tino) Hampson-Medina (he/him) was born in Washington D.C. and raised in San Diego, California. He is of Winnebago, White Earth Chippewa, and Mexican descent and was raised speaking the Spanish and Ho-Chunk as his first languages. In high school Faustino found his passion for conservation and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a byproduct of his frequent visits to his ancestral lands in Winnebago, Nebraska and an IB course called Environmental Systems and Societies. After graduating high school he attended the University of Washington where he studied Environmental Science and Resources Management and minored in American Indian studies. In the first summer at the University of Washington Faustino became a DDCSP@UW scholar as part of the 2018 cohort and followed up in his second summer by interning with the Quinault Indian Tribe's Department of Natural Resources. The summer following his graduation from the University of Washington in 2022 he returned as an alumni intern to work with the Swinomish Tribe on a camas revitalization project and their climate change adaptation plan. Through his passion for his community, education and protecting Mother Nature, Faustino hopes to cultivate an an inclusive environment for scholars to be inquisitive and explore avenues of conservation and environmental justice outside the norm.

Carolyn Finney
Visiting Instructor - Storytelling Mentor; Geography and Communications
  • Website
Carrie Tzou
Educational Research Team
Nini Hayes
Educational Research Team
  • Website

Nini Hayes (pronouns: they/them/their/Professor Hayes/Dr. Hayes) was born and raised in Washington and is a first-generation college student. They are an alumna of Huxley’s Environmental Education program ’03. They earned a Masters in Teaching from Seattle University and taught 5th grade for several years before returning to graduate school where they earned an Educational Specialist degree in Social Justice Education and a doctorate in Teacher Education and School Improvement. After graduate school, they did a one-year post-doc at a college in Poughkeepsie, NY and then one year on the tenure-track before beginning at Huxley.

Megan Bang
Educational Research Team
Mario Guerra
Evaluation Team
Brett Ramey
Director
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[Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska] Brett is an educator, program designer and organizer with over 15 years of experience working at the intersections of ecological, cultural and community health. His work has included designing and instructing courses on food sovereignty, collaborative garden design and Indigenous science at Tribal Universities and medical school enrichment programs, conducting community-centered research on health disparities, facilitating healing retreats for cancer survivors and elevating equity and inclusion discourse within local, regional and National food justice, health equity and environmental organizations.

Anam Mehta
Logistics Coordinator

Anam is a recent graduate of Pomona College, with a B.A. in Environmental Analysis with concentrations in Sustainability in the Built Environment and Geography. They still very much think of themselves as a student with so much to learn in a very large world. They like to make maps, built stories, and be in care relationships with others. As an alum of DDSCP at UW, Anam hopes to bring their experience and love for this program to all aspects of their work. They currently serve the role of logistics coordinator, primarily working with the second year scholars.

Faustino Hampson-Medina
Program Assistant

Faustino (Tino) Hampson-Medina (he/him) was born in Washington D.C. and raised in San Diego, California. He is of Winnebago, White Earth Chippewa, and Mexican descent and was raised speaking the Spanish and Ho-Chunk as his first languages. In high school Faustino found his passion for conservation and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a byproduct of his frequent visits to his ancestral lands in Winnebago, Nebraska and an IB course called Environmental Systems and Societies. After graduating high school he attended the University of Washington where he studied Environmental Science and Resources Management and minored in American Indian studies. In the first summer at the University of Washington Faustino became a DDCSP@UW scholar as part of the 2018 cohort and followed up in his second summer by interning with the Quinault Indian Tribe's Department of Natural Resources. The summer following his graduation from the University of Washington in 2022 he returned as an alumni intern to work with the Swinomish Tribe on a camas revitalization project and their climate change adaptation plan. Through his passion for his community, education and protecting Mother Nature, Faustino hopes to cultivate an an inclusive environment for scholars to be inquisitive and explore avenues of conservation and environmental justice outside the norm.

Mark Arenas
Program Coordinator
Marlen Paredes
Program Assistant

Marlen is very excited to be joining the 2023 scholars as a program assistant for DDCSP UW! Marlen Paredes (they/them) is 1st generation born and raised on ancestral Lenapehoking, in part of what is known currently as New Jersey, to their Honduran and Mexican parents. Marlen grew up in a large city in the most densely populated state in the U.S and not very connected to the sense of wilderness, but always wanted to explore and travel to new places and has been grateful that from the age of 16 they have been able to work and volunteer in the conservation field to make that happen.

Marlen graduated from Kean University with a Bachelor of Science in Sustainability and is a fierce advocate for the earth and marginalized communities. They are currently serving as a member of the Alumni Council for DDCSP’s Alumni network, and have so much love for DDCSP. Their first camping experience was during their time as a scholar at the Northern Arizona University program in the summer of 2016 and they are super thrilled to be spending this summer as UW staff to support this cohort of scholars to make their experience in the program a transformationally memorable one, like it was for Marlen.

Sam Battles
Program Assistant

Sam Battles (he/him) is an alum of the DDCSP@UW 2020 cohort and graduated from Yale with a degree in environmental and ethnic studies. Sam has family ties in New England and Hawai’i, but was born and raised in the Bay Area. He studied food justice and Asian diasporic history, and has a passion for land work and exploring the Bay through public transit. In his time with DDCSP, Sam interned with the Swinomish tribe, supporting their efforts to promote indigenous food sovereignty. Since graduation Sam has continued to work in community-centered agriculture, seeing food as a bridge between ecological and cultural conservation. This has manifested in leading a conservation field crew on O’ahu, spending time at his family’s taro farm on Kaua’i, as well as volunteering with an indigenous land trust on the ancestral home of the Lisjan Ohlone peoples. Overall, Sam continues to forge community around a shared connection to land, food, and art.

Brittany Amaral
Program Assistant
V Espitia
Program Assistant
Nancy Woo
Program Coordinator
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  • Website
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Nancy (she/her)​ is a parent, storyteller, educator, and organizer who is fiercely dedicated to building community power and healing from systemic injustices. Nancy brings empathy, care, and creativity to all her work, including her role in coordinating and facilitating programming for the second year of DDCSP@UW. She is especially keen on curating vulnerable spaces that center belonging and radical self love through an anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal lens. Nancy holds a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition from Bastyr University and a Master of Public Health Nutrition from University of Washington and joined DDCSP through her work in food justice and storytelling. She is most in her element when she's floating in water.

Amy Sanchez
Program Coordinator

Amy Sánchez was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. She received her degree in Animal Biology at UC Davis where she worked for five more years, long enough to call it a second home. In 2017, she moved the furthest North anyone in her family ever had and attended the North Cascades Institute Graduate Residency Program through Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University. Graduating with a M.Ed. in Environmental Education she continues to engage with the field through a critical lens with the hope to broaden conceptualizations and relationships to Place and Land. On her off-time, you can find her adventuring or napping with her fluff ball, Foxy.

Alicia Highland
Learning Facilitator
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Hailing from the Midwest, Alicia’s passion for diversifying the environmental movement is what encouraged her to relocate to Seattle in 2014 and to work for the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington. She has a Bachelor of Science in Conservation Biology from Kent State University and a Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Washington.

Melissa K. Watkinson
Environmental Outreach Specialist
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Adrienne Hampton
Program Coordinator
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José Ochoa
Classroom in the Field Teaching Assistant
  • Email
  • Website
Carolina Gomez-Posada
Classroom in the Field Instructor

cgomez@uw.edu

Kirsten Rowell
Director & Co-PI
  • Email
  • Website
Carolyn Finney
Visiting Instructor - Storytelling Mentor; Geography and Communications
  • Website
Chenjerai Kumanyika
Visiting Instructor - Communications
  • Email
  • Website

Assistant Professor in Communications , Clemson University

Kiki Jenkins
Visiting Instructor
  • Website
Sean Watts
Founding Director
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