Joe Lawrence focuses on Dairy Forage Crop Systems Management in his role as a Senior Extension Associate with the Cornell PRO-DAIRY team. He has been involved in the dairy industry his entire life, growing up on a farm in Northern NY and working in the New York dairy industry for the past 20 years as an Extension Educator and private sector Crop Advisor prior to his current role. As a community volunteer, he has been very active in rural economic development, serving on the Board of Directors of the Lewis County Industrial Development Agency and numerous committees. This combined background in agricultural production, land use, and rural economic development has provided a unique perspective in navigating the interactions between renewable energy projects and local communities.

Emily Pramik is a senior budget and policy analyst at the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), where her research focuses on transportation and transit policies and their impacts on the City’s finances. IBO is an independent and nonpartisan New York City government agency that conducts public research on the City’s policies, budget, and economy to increase transparency into the government for all New Yorkers. Emily’s work at IBO includes analyses of congestion pricing, fare-free transit service, and ridership and revenue impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to IBO, Emily held research positions at the New York City Department of City Planning and MDRC. She also served as a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab.

Janet Pritchard is the Director of Water Infrastructure Policy at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). Janet is a lawyer with broad experience in regulatory law and policy, policy advocacy, and strategic program development. She leads EPIC’s water policy work. Janet has over 25 years of experience in environmental regulatory policy; resource management, infrastructure, and freshwater issues; community resource rights; and cultivating teams of multi-disciplinary professionals to deliver pragmatic policy solutions. She has advised communities, environmental advocates, and government decision makers in the United Kingdom, European Union, Ghana, China, and the United States. At EPIC, Janet leads a team of lawyers, policy analysts, and data scientists holding graduate and doctoral degrees in law, public health, environmental policy, engineering, and data science. The team delivers evidence-based policy analysis to identify how to upgrade and strengthen water infrastructure, with a focus on how access to and distribution of federal and state water infrastructure funds can be improved, particularly for small and under-resourced communities.

Leslie Reynolds is a Research Support Specialist at the Program on Applied Demographics (PAD) at Cornell University, housed within the Cornell Population Center (CPC) and the Brooks School of Public Policy. She holds a master’s degree in applied demography and specializes in population trends and dynamics in New York State, with additional focus on policy impacts, data quality, and all things Census. PAD works closely with the Census Bureau and serves as the New York State representative in the Federal State Cooperatives for Population Estimates (FSCPE) and Projections (FSCPP), and is a Coordinating Agency of the NY State Data Center (NYSDC) (housed at the NYS Department of Labor). Leslie currently serves as the Vice-Chair of both the National State Data Center Network and the FSCPP. At PAD, she also leads the Topics in Demography (TiDbit) brief series which highlights demographic topics in the context of New York State and translates findings for a wide audience. Overall, her work aims to bridge gaps between policy, research, and the public and make demographic research accessible and actionable.

Mathilda Scott serves as a policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute focusing on environmental and health policies and supporting the Institute’s broad range of research topics. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MS from the University of Utah and continues to pursue a PhD in sociology. Previously, she worked at the USDA Rural Development in affordable housing.

As manager for community development under CT Male’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Divisions, Jim Thatcher is responsible for fostering relationships with municipal, non-profit, and private clients and coordinating the identification of funding opportunities and submission of applications that meet clients’ diverse project needs. Thatcher has 25 years of experience in public financing programs and project implementation and compliance. He has a BA in history from Hamilton College and a masters in public administration from Cornell University. Thatcher has called Upstate New York home since moving to the Capital Region in the mid-1970s, and he now resides with his family in the Glens Falls area.

Dr. Parshall is a distinguished professor of political science at Daemen University in Amherst, New York, specializing in American politics, public law, and public policy. She currently serves as the chair of the State and Local Politics Section of the New York State Political Science Association and is a past president of the Northeastern Political Science Association. Dr. Parshall’s research interest is in municipal development and reorganization in New York State. Her work with the Rockefeller Institute focuses on municipal reorganization and local government reform.

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Leigh Wedenoja, chief economist at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, specializes in education, labor, and health policy research. Her work focuses on assessing the causal impact of public policy using both quantitative and qualitative methods. She has worked with New York State agencies and nonprofit organizations on topics including the care workforce, employment for people with disabilities, civil service exams, K-12 and postsecondary education policy, and the overdose epidemic. Dr. Wedenoja is also a lecturer at the University at Albany in the graduate Department of Education Policy & Leadership and her work has appeared in academic publications and the popular press. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Wedenoja served as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University and as administrator of the US Census Bureau’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Cornell University. She holds an MA and PhD in economics from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Michigan.