Climate Action Summit 2024 Moderators and Panelists

Moderator: Paul Lipson

Paul Lipson is an urban solutions consultant specializing in renewables and clean transportation. Lipson’s firm, Barretto Bay Strategies, advises firms active in low-emission transport, offshore wind, and shared solar, each working at the interface of public policy and market development.

From 2004–2011, Lipson served as Chief of Staff to Rep. Jose Serrano (NY-15), a senior appropriator from The Bronx. In 2009, Lipson authored The American Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Act, a bi-partisan bill aimed at scaling up the domestic electric truck industry. Earlier in his career, Lipson co-founded The Point, a pioneering South Bronx CDC active in the sustainability sector.

Panelist: Mychal Johnson

Founding Member and Advisory Board Member, South Bronx Unite

Mychal is a community-based advocate for environmental, economic and social justice in the South Bronx. He is a co-founder of South Bronx Unite and a founding member of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, where is also a board member.

He serves on the board of directors of the NYC Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, and the Community Advisory Board of Columbia University’s NIEHS Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan. Mychal was also appointed as a civil society voting member of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Open Space Committee. He has been a member of Bronx Community Board 1 and was notably selected by the United Nations to serve as one of 38 global civil society appointees to the historic UN Climate Summit in 2014.

He is a long-time activist organizing for greater access to open green space, truly affordable housing, a healthier quality of life, and community-focused development that supports rather than displaces neighborhood residents.

Panelist: Nilka Martell

Founder/Director, Loving The Bronx & Board Chair, Bronx River Alliance, and Pelham Bay Park

Nilka Martell, a passionate environmentalist and community advocate, has significantly contributed to the revitalization of the Bronx River and surrounding areas. Through her organizations, Loving The Bronx and the Bronx River Alliance, Nilka has mobilized countless volunteers for cleanup and conservation projects, fostering a strong sense of community and environmental stewardship. Nilka Martell’s campaign to cap the Cross Bronx Expressway and convert it into green space may finally be reaching fruition. After years of lobbying local elected officials, Martell was joined by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Rep. Ritchie Torres and a slew of other officials in November to celebrate the allocation of federal funds to cap the expressway from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress. The project will take years, but the end to the flow of pollution from the Cross Bronx into surrounding neighborhoods is in sight.

Panelist: Colibri Sanfiorenzo-Barnhard

Executive Director, HASER, Inc.

Colibrí Sanfiorenzo-Barnhard has a background in ecology and administration. For the past 13 years, she has worked in the nonprofit sector with community groups that develop education, conservation, and cultural grassroots actions in Puerto Rico. She is co-founder of HASER. Her background in action-based field ecology research, and her experience with diverse community groups have shaped her vision for social change in Puerto Rico, which focuses on understanding that just and equitable actions done at neighborhood level can cause meaningful global change.

Moderator: Julie L. Gafney, Ph.D.

Executive Director and Assistant Vice President of Strategic Mission Initiatives

Julie L. Gafney, Ph.D. serves as Assistant Vice President for Strategic Mission Initiatives at Fordham University, leading a wide array of strategic planning processes. She has also served as the Executive Director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning at Fordham University for four years, building programs connecting students, faculty, staff and alumni with local and global experiential learning opportunities.

She currently serves as the Thriving Communities Grantmaker Project Lead and Principal Investigator (PI) for Region 2, where she spearheads a $50 million initiative aimed at advancing community-led environmental justice work across New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. At the University, Gafney leads Fordham's green action planning and the implementation of environmental justice initiatives. She is the author of Fordham’s seven-year Green Plan and chairs the Fordham Sustainability Council.

Before Fordham, Dr. Gafney served as a key staff member in the Cuomo administration and went on to support student success, faculty development, community engagement and institutional planning and assessment within the CUNY system.

She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. She has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the University of Chicago, and continues to teach in the English department at Fordham. Her courses explore the intersections of narrative, justice, and environmental concerns.

Panelist: Anuchka Ramos Ruiz, Ph.D.

Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Universidad del Sagrado Corazón

Dr. Anuchka Ramos Ruiz holds a bachelor’s degree in justice systems from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, a master’s degree in editing and study of Spanish and Latin American literary texts from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and a second master’s degree in Hispanic lexicography from Universidad de León and the School of Lexicography of the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid, Spain. Furthermore, she has a doctorate in culture and literature studies from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Her specialty areas are 20th-century and contemporary Latin American literature, Hispanic Caribbean literature, memory genres, chronicle and essay, discourse analysis in popular media, and autofiction. She has published various academic texts in and outside Puerto Rico. Doctor Ramos-Ruiz also has a career as a Puerto Rican writer with the works No me quieras (2013), Claustrofobia (2016), and Autopsia (2018). In 2013 she received the New Voices Award from the Pen Club of Puerto Rico.

In 2021, she was selected by Caribbean Business as one of the 40 leaders under the age of 40 to demonstrate a track record of excellence.

Since 2018, she has led the Memoir Writing Workshop, encouraging research and practice of memoir writing as a literary genre. This project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities through Humanities Puerto Rico. Dr. Ramos Ruiz is one of the editors of the book Memoirs of Sila María Calderón, the first woman governor of Puerto Rico.

Panelist: Patricia Ramsey, Ph.D.

President, CUNY Medgar Evers College

Dr. Patricia Ramsey was appointed by the CUNY Board of Trustees to serve as the sixth president of Medgar Evers College on March 22, 2021. She is the first woman president of Medgar Evers College.

Distinguished as a “National Role Model” by Minority Access, Inc., Dr. Ramsey is a leader and a scholar with a deep commitment to excellence and a passion for making a difference. Dr. Ramsey comes to Medgar Evers College from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), where she served as senior executive fellow. Prior to TMCF, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest degree-granting Historically Black University (HBCU) in the nation. For nearly 12 years, she served in various capacities at Bowie State University, a constituent institution of the University System of Maryland and the oldest HBCU in Maryland. At Bowie State, she was a tenured full professor and served as provost, interim president, and chair of the department of natural sciences. During her tenure at Bowie State, Dr. Ramsey was a thought leader behind the 149,000 square foot Center for Natural Sciences Mathematics and Nursing building. Designed and built with sustainability in mind, this $102 million project won a LEED Platinum certification.

Other positions that she has held include vice president for academic affairs at Shaw University and associate vice president for development at Norfolk State University. An experienced strategist and action-oriented leader, Dr. Ramsey negotiated a $1.3 million award after only three months as a fundraising officer at Norfolk State. With a formidable talent for swiftly assessing the situation and developing a plan of action, she created the infrastructure that resulted in $10 million in grants and contracts in less than two years at Shaw University.

Globally, Dr. Ramsey has impacted higher education on the continents of Europe and Africa. In Europe, she provided oversight for Bowie State’s graduate programs on the military base in Heidelberg, Germany, where she won front-page headlines in the military news for her bold position in allowing a five-year-old military dependent to stand proxy to receive the master’s degree for a deployed soldier. On the continent of Africa, Dr. Ramsey was one of four provosts in the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) delegation to Liberia, where she served in an education advisory capacity to the country’s leader President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In Nigeria, Dr. Ramsey was instrumental in the success of a biotechnology training partnership between Godfrey Okoye University (GOU) in Enugu and Bowie State University. She also represented Lincoln University in Enugu, conducted a leadership workshop for the administration of GOU, and was an on-air radio guest at GOU-Radio.

A biologist by training, Dr. Ramsey has a research interest in the biological activity of plants used in folklore, has collected 110 species of Agave in the Sonoran Desert, and traveled a 450-mile span of highway collecting Sapium sebiferum (popcorn tree) leaves in the southeastern United States. Dr. Ramsey earned a Master of Science in Botany from Howard University, a Master of Arts in Biology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University. Dr. Ramsey received her undergraduate degree from Norfolk State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology Education. She completed executive leadership programs in AASCU’s Millennium Leadership Initiative (MLI), Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management (IEM), and the CIVIC Leadership Institute.

Panelist: Mei Wei, Ph.D.

Vice President of Research, Biomedical Engineering, Rowan University

Wei joined Rowan July 1 from Ohio University, an R1 public research institution where she served as associate vice president for research and creative activity. Previously, she served as dean of engineering at Ohio University during its transition to R1 and associate dean for research and graduate education at the University of Connecticut, another R1 institution.

Wei’s professional appointments have included interdisciplinary work in materials science and engineering, and biomedical engineering. A fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Wei has received numerous awards for innovation and professional excellence.

An expert in biomaterials, Wei is also an entrepreneur who co-founded a biomedical device startup company specializing in products for improved bone repair and regeneration. She holds six patents and has published more than 200 refereed journal articles and conference proceedings.