Colin M. Maclay is a specialist in innovation and change, and a hacker of academia. He has long sought to understand how radical advances in communications capacity, information generation and processing interact with people, organizations and institutions to influence societal and planetary wellbeing. Maclay focuses on environmental justice, climate change and sustainability, building upon long standing engagement with civic media, libraries, journalism and cultural strategies, as well as past work in digital transformation, mis and disinformation, online expression and privacy, and technology and policy infrastructures. 

Maclay’s approach recognizes that while media and technology are complicated – and humans more so – their interaction is profoundly complex. He seeks to connect scholarship and practice, bridge disciplines and sectors, and challenge hierarchies and orthodoxies. Maclay revels in connecting diverse people and ideas in the pursuit of exploring wicked problems, developing novel insights and associated strategies for learning and change. Maclay created and leads the USC Civic Media Fellowship, co-leads the Media As Socio-Technical Systems research community (MASTS), is a co-founder of the USC Arts & Climate Collective, co-hosts the How Do You Like It So Far podcast, and serves on the USC Presidential Working Group on Sustainability. 

Previously, he was Founding Director of the Digital Initiative at the Harvard Business School, an effort to understand and shape the digital transformation of business and society through collaborative research, teaching and engagement with the practice. He spent a decade helping build and scale Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, including its transition to a university-wide center and significant growth. He co-founded the Global Network Initiative, an innovative multi-stakeholder effort to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy online. He has advised and served on the boards of numerous private, governmental and non-profit organizations. Maclay has done research, given invited talks and organized seminars and workshops events on five continents; and created and been featured in diverse media.

Maclay holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin, MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD from Northeastern University.

Robin Craig specializes in all things water, including the relationships between climate change and water; the water-energy-food nexus; the Clean Water Act; the intersection of water issues and land issues; ocean and coastal law; marine biodiversity and marine protected areas; water law; ecological resilience and the law; climate change adaptation, and the relationships between environmental law and public health. She is the author, co-author, or editor of 12 books, including Re-Envisioning the Anthropocene Ocean (University of Utah Press, forthcoming, with Jeffrey M. McCarthy); The End of Sustainability (Kansas University Press 2017, with Melinda Harm Benson); Contemporary Issues in Climate Change Law and Policy (Environmental Law Institute 2016, with Stephen Miller); Comparative Ocean Governance: Place- Based Protections in an Era of Climate Change (Edward Elgar 2012); and The Clean Water Act and the Constitution (Environmental Law Institute 2nd Ed. 2009), as well as textbooks for environmental law, water law, and toxic torts. She has also written more than 100 law review articles and book chapters in both legal and scientific publications.

In recognition of her work on these topics, Craig was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2015 and the American College of Environmental Lawyers in 2019 and has been appointed to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Commission on Environmental Law and to the Center for Progressive Reform. She has served on six National Academy of Sciences committees that evaluated Florida Everglades restoration, implementation of the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan, and application of the Clean Water Act to the Mississippi River. She has consulted on water quality issues with the government of Victoria, Australia, and the Council on Environmental Cooperation in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and she was one of 12 marine educators chosen to participate in a 2010 program in the Papahanamokuakea Marine National Monument, spending a week on Midway Atoll. She was also a principal researcher in a four-year grant project on Adaptive Water Governance sponsored by the National Social-Ecological Synthesis Center with money from the National Science Foundation. In 2018, Craig was named a William Evans Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. In 2017, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a Bellagio Center Writing Residency fellowship, allowing her to spend four weeks on Lake Como, Italy, working on a new book project on Re-Envisioning the Anthropocene Oceans, and in 2016 she was a research fellow at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.

Dr. Anthony Carlos is the Senior Manager for Postdoctoral Affairs in the Office of the Executive Vice Provost at USC. In this role, he manages operations for postdoctoral scholars and their faculty supervisors, clinical residents and fellows, works with campus partners across the academic units and provides guidance to ensure compliance with Provost postdoc policies. He oversees several academic initiatives, including the Provost’s signature programs for postdoctoral scholars and provides administrative and operational leadership for postdoctoral programming on campus. Dr. Carlos has been committed to the academic research and professional success of USC postdocs for many years, including as Chair of the USC Postdoctoral Association prior to joining the Provost Office. He was on the leadership team that launched the inaugural SoCal Postdoc Symposium, which brought together the postdoc communities from across Southern California’s universities and various industries. In addition, since Dr. Carlos joined USC, he has directed efforts to reshape the office’s administrative operations, has provided clarity to office workflows and processes and has helped strengthen internal and external partnerships.

Dr. Carlos’ research specialty focused on biochemistry and molecular medicine. During his postdoc at the Norris Cancer Center of USC Keck School of Medicine, he studied the role of molecular chaperones in endoplasmic reticulum stress, and cell surface trafficking deficits in different disease states, including in viral infection and cancer. Much of his work was funded through research awards from NIH National Cancer Institute Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities (NIH/NCI CRCHD), leading to publications in ASBMB’s Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Neuroinflammation and the Journal of Infection. 

Dr. Carlos holds a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, where he studied molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases.