Other Presenters

Brook Thompson is a Yurok and Karuk Native American from Northern California. Currently, she is a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies. In 2022 she received a Masters from Stanford University in Environmental Engineering, with a focus on water resources and hydrology. In 2020 she graduated from Portland State University’s Honors College with a degree in Civil Engineering and a minor in Political Science. Brook also attended Franklin High School in SE Portland.

​Currently, Brook works as a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe. Previously she has been an intern for the City of Portland, Bureau of Environmental Services, The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, West Yost Associates Engineering, California Water Resource Control Board, and Save California Salmon.

Brook is a Gates Millennium Scholar, UNITY 2020 25 Under 25 Recipient, and a 2017 Undergraduate AIGC Student of the Year Awardee. Most recently won a 2022 Native American Journalism Award, among other honors.

​Her goal is to bring together water rights and Native American knowledge through engineering, public policy, and social action. Current fights for Ms.Thompson include undamming the Klamath River, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Woman and Children (MMIW) awareness, supporting Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and encouraging women and Natives in STEM fields.

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Katherine Hegewisch is a project scientist at the University of California Merced, where she is an applied researcher in the Applied Climate Science Lab. She helps to maintain large climate datasets (past observations, forecasts and future projections) and develops web tools to improve the accessibility of climate data. She is a lead developer of the Climate Toolbox, an online suite of over 20 web tools which provide climate and hydrology summaries on maps and graphs to inform decision making related to heat stress, drought, agriculture and wildfire danger. Hegewisch earned her B.S from California State University Chico, and her M.S. and PhD from Washington State University. The data and tools she helps develop have been used in National Climate Assessments and in peer-reviewed scientific publications and are used every day by decision makers to monitor the climate.

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Dr. Thomas Doherty is a Clinical and Environmental Psychologist based in Portland, Oregon who has developed a specialty addressing people’s concerns about environmental issues and climate change. His multiple publications on nature and mental health include the groundbreaking paper “The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change,” co-authored by Susan Clayton, cited over 750 times. Thomas is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), Past President of the APA Div. 34 Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology, and Founding Editor of the academic journal Ecopsychology. Thomas was a member of the APA’s first Task Force on Global Climate Change and founded one of the first environmentally-focused certificate programs for mental health counselors in the US at Lewis & Clark Graduate School. Thomas is originally from Buffalo, New York.

Dr. Thomas Doherty’s work has been featured in publications like the New York Times. He also co-hosts the Climate Change and Happiness podcast.

You can learn more about Dr. Thomas Doherty at his website.