Speaker Bios
Suellen Breaky, Ph.D., RN, is Director of the Center for Climate Change, Climate Justice, and Health and a Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at MGH Institute of Health Professions. She teaches in the Doctor of Nursing Practice and accelerated BSN programs. Her clinical background includes cardiac surgery, critical care, hospice care, and global health nursing. For over 10 years, she was a leader with Team Heart, a nonprofit organization that provides RHD screening, cardiac surgical care and follow-up, and patient/provider education in Rwanda. Her scholarship interests include the impact of climate change on human health and well-being, bioethics, and global health ethics. Dr. Breakey is a co-author of Global Nursing in the 21st Century, which was published in 2015. She co-chaired the National League for Nursing’s 2022 Vision Statement on Climate Change and Health. Dr. Breakey has published widely and presented locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Susan Clayton, Ph.D., is the Whitmore-Williams Professor and Chair of Psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Dr. Clayton’s research examines people’s relationship with the natural environment, how it is socially constructed, and how climate change affects mental health and well-being. She is author or editor of six books, including Identity and the Natural Environment, Conservation Psychology, and Psychology and Climate Change, and is currently the editor of the Cambridge Elements series in Applied Social Psychology. A fellow of the American Psychological Association and the International Association of Applied Psychology, she was a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Stacia Clinton, RDN., LDN., is Senior Project Lead at Health Care Without Harm. Inspired by the role of food and health as a social and cultural connector and powerful change agent, Stacia trained as a Registered Dietitian, leading the provision of food and clinical nutrition care in small and large scale health care facilities. Disenfranchised by the fragmented state of our health system and driven by an awareness of systemic injustice, she joined Health Care Without Harm where over the past 16 years she has served in leadership directing programs at the intersection of human and environmental health to ignite the health sector mission to First Do No Harm.
Grace Kaseke Kindeke is NH Program Coordinator, American Friends Service Committee, an artist, activist, and a B.A. student of Africana Studies and Sociology at UMASS Boston. She is an avid reader, a passionate speaker and fierce advocate for justice, healing and liberation, grounding her work in a Black feminist, African-futurist and anti-oppression practice. She is the recipient the 2017 MIT Infinite Mile Award for Community Building, the 2022 NAACP Youth Excellence in Service award, and the 2023 NH Martin Luther King award. She was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and raised in New Hampshire where she currently lives with her family.
Amanda H. Lynch, Ph.D., is Lindemann Distinguished Professor, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University. Amanda Lynch obtained her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Melbourne. Lynch developed the first Arctic regional climate system model in 1993, won the Priestly Medal in 2008, and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research, and the World Academy of Art and Science. She was an Australian Federation Fellow, President of the American Society of Policy Scientists, and Chair of the National Science Foundation Arctic Portfolio Review. Lynch was the founding director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. In 2022, she won the Myres S. McDougal Prize in International Law. She has been an editor at Journal of Climate; Weather, Climate and Society; and Science Advances. Her research--as represented in three books and over 120 research articles and book chapters--concerns the intersections between science, policy and law, with a focus on the Arctic as a place that expresses convergences of rapid change in natural and human systems. Lynch has collaborated with a range of stakeholders and community partners, including Iñupiat, Iñuit, Sakha, Sámi, Udege and Yorta Yorta Indigenous peoples. Current projects are focused on the impacts of Arctic change on communities, economies, strategic postures, and claims of sovereignty. At present, Lynch is chair of the Research Board at the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.
Ceasar McDowell is Professor of the Practice of Civic Design at MIT. Ceasar teaches on civic and community engagement and the use of social technology to enhance both. His current work is on the design of civic infrastructures and processes to connect the increasingly demographically complex public. He co-hosts the WeWhoEngage a podcast series on civic design. Ceasar brings his deep commitment to the work of building beloved, just and equitable communities that are able to – as his friend Carl Moore says – ”struggle with traditions that bind and the interests that separate in order to build a future that is an equitable improvement on the past.”
Anthony S. Poore, President/CEO, New Hampshire Center for Justice & Equity, has worked in support of transformative systems change and equitable and sustainable communities for more than 33 years as a community organizer and economic development practitioner, academic, workforce housing and public health advocate, policy analyst, researcher and executive. Prior to the launch of the NH Center for Justice & Equity in 2022, Anthony managed AP Consulting Group, working with traditional and non-traditional financial institutions and community-based organizations helping support public-private community economic development projects. From 2018 to 2021, Poore served as the Executive Director of New Hampshire Humanities, an affiliated organization of the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2010 – 2018, Poore worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in a variety of leadership roles, directing research and policy initiatives of the Boston Fed’s Regional and Community Outreach Department. Prior to that, Poore served as the Assistant Dean for Southern New Hampshire University’s School of Economic Development. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority, and Walden Mutual Bank.
Kurt Yuengling, Community Engagement Specialist, New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, started with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services’ (NHDES) Environmental Health Program in November 2023 in a new Community Engagement position. He works with the NHDES Technical Services team working on climate action planning under the EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. Prior, Kurt taught earth and environmental sciences at community colleges in Michigan and Arizona, worked as a geologist in Alaska and New Hampshire, and worked in wetlands and stormwater compliance programs at the NHDES and the State of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geological sciences from the State University of NY at Geneseo and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
