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.

Kritika Vidyashankar is an urban planner with experience supporting complex projects across infrastructure, land use, environmental planning, and urban development, with a strong focus on analysis, coordination, and execution. She is currently completing a master’s in city and regional planning at Cornell University, where her work emphasizes using data, spatial analysis, and policy research to inform practical, implementable decisions.

Vidyashankar’s background includes work with municipalities, consulting-adjacent research teams, nonprofits, and academic labs in both the United States and India. She has contributed to planning and redevelopment projects involving GIS-based analysis, site evaluation, regulatory and policy review, stakeholder engagement, and synthesis of technical inputs into clear narratives for decision-makers.

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.

Emily Pramik is a senior budget and policy analyst focusing on transportation and transit at the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO). Her work at IBO has included analyses of congestion pricing, fare-free transit service, and ridership and revenue impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to joining IBO, Pramik worked in several roles using data analysis to evaluate and improve local government policies. At the New York City Department of City Planning, her analytical work informed interagency capital investments and strategy. She served as a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab, assisting the State of Rhode Island in the performance management and evaluation of its workforce development partnerships. Pramik began her policy career as a research assistant supporting randomized controlled trials at MDRC.

Pramik holds a master of public policy degree from the University of Michigan and an AB in economics from the University of Chicago.

Julia Konrad is the assistant director of the Education team at the NYC Independent Budget Office. In that role, she supports IBO’s research on New York City schools and on the City University of New York. She enjoys every opportunity to speak with New Yorkers about school policies, budgets, and more. Before joining IBO in 2022, Julia taught 11th-grade US history at a Brooklyn public school.

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.