Maia Woluchem is a Tech Fellow on the Civic Engagement and Government team at the Ford Foundation, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Public Service at the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU, teaching a course on segregation. At Ford, she works across a range of civil society organizations on examining the intersection of technology and civil society. She received her MCP in Urban Planning from MIT in 2019.

Prior to her graduate work at MIT, Maia was a researcher at the Urban Institute, where she focused on how data and technology could democratize opportunity in support of social change, with a particular emphasis on ensuring community engagement and leadership with respect to how data is used, analyzed, and collected. While at Urban, Maia also helped foster the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a network working to advance the effective and equitable use of data across government, civil society groups, and academia.

Veronica L. Womack serves as the Executive Director of the Rural Studies Institute at Georgia College and Professor of Political Science and Public Administration. She received her BA of Communications, MPA and Ph.D., in Political Science from the University of Alabama.

Her research focuses on rural communities, with a particular focus on the Southern Black Belt region of the American South. She is a noted author and researcher. Funders of her research include USDA, the Robert W. Johnson foundation, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project (SEAP). She is also the founder of the Blackfarmersnetwork.com, a website that highlights the legacy of African American farmers, in the Black Belt region of the South. She has been featured on various media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, GPB, The Nation, and Georgia Trend for her work in the region.

Joseph S. Wood is a geographer whose academic work focuses on the North American cultural landscape. He’s taught at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; George Mason University, where he chaired the Department of Geography and Earth Systems Science and served as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs; and the University of Southern Maine as Provost and Interim President. He served as Provost at the University of Baltimore from 2009 to 2016. Wood’s publications in cultural geography explore a variety of topics from the New England village as invented tradition to contemporary Vietnamese place-making in American suburbs and much more. At UB, Joe teaches about how Americans have shaped their cities, and in 2015 he developed the community forum-based Divided Baltimore course to address how the geography of Baltimore entrenches structural racism. He’s an AGS Travel Program lecturer in Cambodia and Vietnam, across Canada by train, and, most recently, by ship from Newfoundland into the Great Lakes. He holds Geography degrees in all levels of education; a BA from Middlebury College, an MA from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University.

Adriana A. Zuniga-Teran currently works at the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning and the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, at The University of Arizona. Adriana does research in Social and Environmental Sciences with a focus on arid lands. She works with stakeholders and community partners to answer questions related to water security, urban resilience, and environmental justice, by focusing on greenspace/green infrastructure across the urban-rural continuum.