We are a catalyzing force for better policy making by encouraging Americans to talk to each other again, and to solve problems through civil dialogue and scientific thinking. A project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Learn more at institute.dmns.org

George Sparks has been the President/CEO of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science since November 2004. He spent 24 years in the electronics measurement business at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. His career included marketing, sales, and general management of global businesses in software, systems, and services.

Prior to joining Hewlett-Packard, George spent 9 years in the Air Force as a pilot and as an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics at the USAF Academy (1976-1978). He is a Distinguished Graduate of the USAF Academy with a BS in Aeronautical Engineering and holds an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT.

George's passion is public policy, particularly around science and education. He is a member of the Colorado Forum, Colorado Concern, and is on the Boards of Colorado Education Initiative, Colorado Business Round Table, Colorado Music Hall of Fame, Denver Council of Foreign Relations, and Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

George is the founder of the Institute for Science & Policy, a program of the Museum.

Kristan Uhlenbrock is the Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy, a project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, where she works to ensure science has a respected role in public discourse and policymaking. She is motivated by life’s interesting people, places, problems, and potential for advancing our understanding of the world and the solutions we need to sustain it.  

For the past two decades, she’s worked at the intersection of science, policy, community engagement, and communication for organizations like the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the Center for American Progress, the American Geophysical Union, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the White House. In 2023, she was the recipient of the National Academies Eric & Wendy Schmidt Excellence in Science Communication Award.  

Kristan values giving back through leadership and volunteer roles, including serving on boards and committees for the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, the American Meteorological Society, the Association of Science & Technology Centers, and the Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains Board, as well as being a mentor for the Morgridge Acceleration Program and the Promoting Geoscience Research, Education, and Success Program. She was a CIVIC DNA Fellow and an ASTC Deliberation & Dialogue Fellow.  

Katherine is Chair of 38 North Solutions, a public policy consultancy specializing in clean energy and innovation. In this role, Katherine has been listed on the #Solar100 board by kWh Analytics and received a Cleanie Award as Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018. Katherine was Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum‘s Future of Advanced Energy Technology Global Future Council and President of GRID Alternatives Mid-Atlantic. Katherine served as President of the GridWise Alliance, advocating for nearly $5 billion in funding for smart grid projects in the Recovery Act. Katherine is part of The Energy Gang podcast through Greentech Media. 

Dr. Karl Hausker is a Senior Fellow in WRI’s Climate Program. He leads analysis and modeling of deep decarbonization climate mitigation, electricity market design, and the social cost of carbon. He testifies before Congress, lectures widely on deep decarbonization, and led the Risky Business study of clean energy scenarios for the U.S.

He has worked for three decades in the fields of climate change, energy, and environment in a career that has spanned legislative and executive branches, research institutions, NGOs, and consulting. He has led climate policy analysis and modeling projects for USAID, USEPA, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Western Climate Initiative, and the California Air Resources Board. Much of his work has focused on the electricity and transportation sectors, and on low carbon, climate resilient development strategies.

From 2007-2013, Karl was a Vice President at ICF International. He previously served as Deputy Director at the Center for Climate Strategies and as a Principal with Hagler Bailly. Karl lived in India all of 1999 as a Visiting Fellow at TERI.

His experience also includes: serving President Clinton as Deputy Assistant Administrator in EPA’s Policy Office where he represented EPA in interagency climate policy development and at COP-1; and serving as the Chief Economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where he worked on a diverse set of issues including electricity restructuring, CAFE standards, alternative fuels, western water policy, nuclear power, and energy security.

Karl holds an M.P.P and Ph.D. in Public Policy from University of California, Berkeley, and received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cornell University.

Alice K. Jackson is President of Xcel Energy – Colorado, a company serving 1.4 million electric customers and 1.3 million natural gas customers. The company is a recognized industry leader in delivering affordable and reliable service, providing clean energy choices, and in reducing carbon and other emissions. Since joining Xcel Energy in 2011, Ms. Jackson has held various positions of increasing responsibility. Most recently Ms. Jackson was Vice President of Strategic Revenue Initiatives, where she built a team to generate new revenues through exploring and integrating new technologies and economic development initiatives in addition to looking at new options for Xcel Energy’s unregulated businesses. Prior to her corporate strategic role, Alice held the lead regulatory position with Xcel Energy—Texas/New Mexico and then with Xcel Energy—Colorado.

Carlos leads 60 employees and works closely with his Board of Trustees, partner organizations, agencies, elected officials and other key decision-makers to advance conservation. He previously led TNC’s Patagonia team in their efforts to safeguard grasslands through private lands conservation, sustainable sheep ranching initiatives, and creating and strengthening public protected areas. Prior to that role, he spent six years based in Arlington, Virginia working as the Conservancy’s Senior Foreign Legal Advisor for South America. A native of Argentina, Carlos earned his law degree from Argentina’s Mendoza University and a graduate law degree at Georgetown University.

All Symposium attendees are invited to join interactive virtual breakout sessions via the Hopin platform. These facilitated, small group discussions will cover a range of topics and allow you to participate in the conversation as well as hear perspectives from other engaged members of the science and policy communities.

Breakout sessions will take place on December 1 and 3 from 10:15 - 10:45 a.m. Mountain Time. (A full list of topics and moderators is available here.) Participants may join any session they wish; however, please note that each room will be capped at 20 guests. 

To join a breakout session during the event, please visit the main Symposium 2020 page on Hopin.

We are a catalyzing force for better policy making by encouraging Americans to talk to each other again, and to solve problems through civil dialogue and scientific thinking. A project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Learn more at institute.dmns.org

Lauren Feldman is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is a leading scholar in the areas of political and science communication, and media effects. Her current research emphasizes three primary areas of interest: climate change communication, partisan media and misinformation, and comedy and social change. Feldman’s research has been published in more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as in several edited volumes, and has been widely covered in major media outlets. She is co-author, with Caty Borum Chattoo, of the book, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice (University of California Press, 2020), about the role of comedy in social justice issues, including climate change. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on Journalism, the Spanish Ministry of Science, among other funders, and has been recognized with various academic awards. Feldman serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Environmental Communication, and she is an affiliate of the Rutgers Climate Institute and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Feldman earned her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University.   

Alan C. Miller is the founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. He established the national education nonprofit in 2008, following a 21-year career at the Los Angeles Times, to teach teenagers how to discern fact from fiction in the digital age. Now NLP has grown to provide programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy. NLP serves more than 27,000 educators and 166,000 students in all 50 states and in 116 other countries through its Checkology® virtual classroom. Alan received more than a dozen national reporting honors, including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and has a master’s degree in political science from the University of Hawaii. 

Ivan Penn is a Los Angeles-based energy correspondent for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2018, he covered utility and energy issues for nearly eight years at The Tampa Bay Times and then The Los Angeles Times. He also worked at The Miami Herald and The Baltimore Sun, where he was an investigative reporter and covered government, politics and criminal justice. He has won numerous awards and honors, including the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and selection as a 2005-2006 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. A native of Washington, Ivan grew up in Maryland and graduated from the University of Maryland.

Michael Elizabeth Sakas is a climate and environmental reporter for Colorado Public Radio News, where she started as a fellow in 2016. Her work has been heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Here and Now, Science Friday and the BBC. Michael feels fortunate to tell the stories of the people and places of Colorado, where she was born and raised. She graduated Colorado State University in 2013 and is pursuing a master’s in journalism. 

Carlos Curbelo represented Florida’s 26th Congressional District from 2015 to 2019. In the House, he was consistently ranked one of the most bipartisan members for his work to build consensus across the aisle on challenging policy questions.

While in Congress, Carlos led on climate policy, immigration reform, and gun safety. He co-founded and co-chaired the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, served in a leadership role in the Problem Solvers Caucus, and led the Brazil Caucus to strengthen the bilateral relationship with Latin-America’s leading economy. In 2017, he was honored by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation with the New Frontier Award for his work promoting bipartisan cooperation on environmental policy. In 2018, he filed the landmark Market Choice Act, ambitious legislation that would invest nearly a trillion dollars in American infrastructure while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by pricing carbon. 

Prior to his election to the U.S. House, Carlos served on the school board for Miami-Dade County, overseeing the fourth largest school district in the country. He completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2019, and serves as a distinguished visiting fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Carlos is an analyst for NBC News, MSNBC, and Telemundo, and after departing Congress launched Vocero LLC, a communications and public affairs firm.

Zahra Hirji is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

Kristan Uhlenbrock is the Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy, a project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, where she works to ensure science has a respected role in public discourse and policymaking. She is motivated by life’s interesting people, places, problems, and potential for advancing our understanding of the world and the solutions we need to sustain it.  

For the past two decades, she’s worked at the intersection of science, policy, community engagement, and communication for organizations like the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the Center for American Progress, the American Geophysical Union, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the White House. In 2023, she was the recipient of the National Academies Eric & Wendy Schmidt Excellence in Science Communication Award.  

Kristan values giving back through leadership and volunteer roles, including serving on boards and committees for the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, the American Meteorological Society, the Association of Science & Technology Centers, and the Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains Board, as well as being a mentor for the Morgridge Acceleration Program and the Promoting Geoscience Research, Education, and Success Program. She was a CIVIC DNA Fellow and an ASTC Deliberation & Dialogue Fellow.  

George Sparks has been the President/CEO of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science since November 2004. He spent 24 years in the electronics measurement business at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. His career included marketing, sales, and general management of global businesses in software, systems, and services.

Prior to joining Hewlett-Packard, George spent 9 years in the Air Force as a pilot and as an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics at the USAF Academy (1976-1978). He is a Distinguished Graduate of the USAF Academy with a BS in Aeronautical Engineering and holds an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT.

George's passion is public policy, particularly around science and education. He is a member of the Colorado Forum, Colorado Concern, and is on the Boards of Colorado Education Initiative, Colorado Business Round Table, Colorado Music Hall of Fame, Denver Council of Foreign Relations, and Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

George is the founder of the Institute for Science & Policy, a program of the Museum.

Alan C. Miller is the founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. He established the national education nonprofit in 2008, following a 21-year career at the Los Angeles Times, to teach teenagers how to discern fact from fiction in the digital age. Now NLP has grown to provide programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy. NLP serves more than 27,000 educators and 166,000 students in all 50 states and in 116 other countries through its Checkology® virtual classroom. Alan received more than a dozen national reporting honors, including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and has a master’s degree in political science from the University of Hawaii. 

Eitan Hersh is associate professor of political science at Tufts University. His research focuses on US elections, voting rights, and civic participation. Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020), Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as over a dozen scholarly articles. Hersh earned his PhD from Harvard in 2011 and served as assistant professor of political science at Yale University from 2011-2017. His public writings have appeared in venues such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, POLITICO, and the Boston Globe. Hersh regularly testifies in voting rights court cases and has testified to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the role of data analytics in political campaigns.  

Lauren Feldman is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is a leading scholar in the areas of political and science communication, and media effects. Her current research emphasizes three primary areas of interest: climate change communication, partisan media and misinformation, and comedy and social change. Feldman’s research has been published in more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as in several edited volumes, and has been widely covered in major media outlets. She is co-author, with Caty Borum Chattoo, of the book, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice (University of California Press, 2020), about the role of comedy in social justice issues, including climate change. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on Journalism, the Spanish Ministry of Science, among other funders, and has been recognized with various academic awards. Feldman serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Environmental Communication, and she is an affiliate of the Rutgers Climate Institute and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Feldman earned her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University.   

Jen Schwartz is a senior editor of features at Scientific American who produces stories on the intersection of technology and society. She specializes in writing about how people and systems are adapting to climate change, automation and disinformation. Her article “Underwater,” about a New Jersey community that is radically adapting to sea-level rise, won a 2019 Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. Schwartz previously worked as an editor or reporter at Popular Science, GQ, New York, Outside, Self and the Boston Globe. She has extensive media experience and has led discussions at the Tribeca Film Festival, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, 3M, and others. She holds a B.S. in journalism, with a minor in environmental science, from Boston University.

Daniel Sarewitz’s work focuses on revealing the connections between science policy decisions, scientific research and social outcomes. How does the distribution of the social benefits of science relate to the way that we organize scientific inquiry? What accounts for the highly uneven advance of know-how related to solving human problems? How do the interactions between scientific uncertainty and human values influence decision making? How does technological innovation influence politics? And how can improved insight into such questions contribute to improved real-world practice? His current activities include a project (with writer Lee Gutkind) on harmonies between science and religion.

Sarewitz edits the magazine Issues in Science and Technology, and is a regular columnist for Nature magazine. His article “Saving Science,” a broad assessment of the current crisis of quality and public value in the American research system, appeared in the summer 2016 issue of The New Atlantis magazine. His most recent book is The Techno-Human Condition (MIT Press, 2011), co-authored with Braden Allenby.

From 1989 to 1993, Sarewitz worked on R&D policy issues as a staff member in the US House of Representatives, and principal speech writer for Committee Chairman George E. Brown, Jr. He received a doctorate in geological sciences from Cornell University in 1986. He now directs CSPO’s office in Washington, DC, and focuses his efforts on a range of activities to increase CSPO’s impact on federal science and technology policy processes, and its contributions to public dialogue on the social and political aspects of scientific and technological change.

Katherine is Chair of 38 North Solutions, a public policy consultancy specializing in clean energy and innovation. In this role, Katherine has been listed on the #Solar100 board by kWh Analytics and received a Cleanie Award as Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018. Katherine was Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum‘s Future of Advanced Energy Technology Global Future Council and President of GRID Alternatives Mid-Atlantic. Katherine served as President of the GridWise Alliance, advocating for nearly $5 billion in funding for smart grid projects in the Recovery Act. Katherine is part of The Energy Gang podcast through Greentech Media. 

Ivan Penn is a Los Angeles-based energy correspondent for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2018, he covered utility and energy issues for nearly eight years at The Tampa Bay Times and then The Los Angeles Times. He also worked at The Miami Herald and The Baltimore Sun, where he was an investigative reporter and covered government, politics and criminal justice. He has won numerous awards and honors, including the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and selection as a 2005-2006 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. A native of Washington, Ivan grew up in Maryland and graduated from the University of Maryland.

Carlos leads 60 employees and works closely with his Board of Trustees, partner organizations, agencies, elected officials and other key decision-makers to advance conservation. He previously led TNC’s Patagonia team in their efforts to safeguard grasslands through private lands conservation, sustainable sheep ranching initiatives, and creating and strengthening public protected areas. Prior to that role, he spent six years based in Arlington, Virginia working as the Conservancy’s Senior Foreign Legal Advisor for South America. A native of Argentina, Carlos earned his law degree from Argentina’s Mendoza University and a graduate law degree at Georgetown University.

Dr. Karl Hausker is a Senior Fellow in WRI’s Climate Program. He leads analysis and modeling of deep decarbonization climate mitigation, electricity market design, and the social cost of carbon. He testifies before Congress, lectures widely on deep decarbonization, and led the Risky Business study of clean energy scenarios for the U.S.

He has worked for three decades in the fields of climate change, energy, and environment in a career that has spanned legislative and executive branches, research institutions, NGOs, and consulting. He has led climate policy analysis and modeling projects for USAID, USEPA, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Western Climate Initiative, and the California Air Resources Board. Much of his work has focused on the electricity and transportation sectors, and on low carbon, climate resilient development strategies.

From 2007-2013, Karl was a Vice President at ICF International. He previously served as Deputy Director at the Center for Climate Strategies and as a Principal with Hagler Bailly. Karl lived in India all of 1999 as a Visiting Fellow at TERI.

His experience also includes: serving President Clinton as Deputy Assistant Administrator in EPA’s Policy Office where he represented EPA in interagency climate policy development and at COP-1; and serving as the Chief Economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where he worked on a diverse set of issues including electricity restructuring, CAFE standards, alternative fuels, western water policy, nuclear power, and energy security.

Karl holds an M.P.P and Ph.D. in Public Policy from University of California, Berkeley, and received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cornell University.