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.  

In her free time, Kristan enjoys escaping to the outdoors, writing, and good food and drink with friends. 

Zivvy Epstein is a PhD student in the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab.  His work integrates aspects of design and computational social science to model and understand cooperative systems. He focuses on new challenges and opportunities that emerge from a digital society, particularly in the domains of artificial intelligence and social media. 

Cary Funk is director of science and society research at Pew Research Center, where she leads the Center’s efforts to understand the implications of science for society. Center studies look at the social, ethical and policy implications of scientific developments in areas such as climate and energy, emerging issues in genetic engineering, and food and space science. She has authored or co-authored a number of reports focused on public trust in science, scientific experts and science news and information. 

Funk has broad expertise in public opinion research and has specialized in public understanding of science topics for nearly two decades. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she directed the Virginia Commonwealth University Life Sciences Surveys, national surveys on science and biotechnology. Funk began her career at CBS News in New York working on preelection polling and analysis of exit polls. She earned a doctorate and a master’s in social psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. He was an Australian Professorial Fellow from 2007 to 2012, and was awarded a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. He held a Revesz Visiting Professorship at the University of Amsterdam in 2012, and received a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society upon moving to the UK in 2013. He was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science in 2017. In 2016, he was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education. 

His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. His most recent research interests examine the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of the global climate, which has led him into research in climate science and climate modeling. As a result of his work in climate science he was appointed Visiting Scientist at the CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere laboratory in Hobart, Tasmania, in August 2017. He also retains links with his former host institution, the University of Western Australia. 

He has published more than 200 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to corrections of misinformation and what variables determine people’s acceptance of scientific findings. (See www.cogsciwa.com for a complete list of scientific publications.) 

Professor Lewandowsky is an award-winning teacher and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 2006-2008. He has also contributed around 50 opinion pieces to the global media on issues related to climate change “skepticism” and the coverage of science in the media. He is currently serving as Digital Content Editor for the Psychonomic Society and blogs routinely on cognitive research at https://featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/. His personal blog is at http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/. 

Alexandra Witze is a freelance science journalist and correspondent for Nature magazine. She writes news and features, primarily about the physical sciences, from her base in Boulder, Colorado. Her work also appears in Science News, Knowable, and other outlets. With her husband Jeff Kanipe, she is the author of Island on Fire, a book about the extraordinary 18^th-century eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki (Pegasus Books, 2015).

Alex is a nationally known science writer whose awards include top journalism prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Association of Science Writers. Among other places her reporting has taken her to the North Pole, to an earthquake zone in China, and to Maya ruins in the Guatemalan jungle. She is president of the Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains, treasurer and board member of The Open Notebook, and former treasurer and board member of the National Association of Science Writers.

Between 2005 and 2010 she served as features editor, news editor, and Washington bureau chief for Nature. Alex has also worked as a general science reporter at the Dallas Morning News in Texas and as an editor at the first Earth magazine, in Wisconsin. She has a bachelor’s degree in geology from MIT and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Katie Sanders is the managing editor of PolitiFact. Previously, she fact-checked talking heads and opinion-shapers for PunditFact as well as the Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott for PolitiFact Florida, reporting from the Tallahassee bureau of the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Florida, where she majored in English and journalism. 

Nabiha Syed is President of The Markup. She oversees The Markup’s strategy, growth plans and business operations. Nabiha also oversees legal, communications, personnel and other operational matters. 

Before joining The Markup, Nabiha was vice president and associate general counsel at BuzzFeed, where she counseled on newsgathering, libel, and privacy matters worldwide. Under her leadership, the company successfully defended against libel litigation arising out of the publication of the Steele dossier and initiated numerous notable access litigations. Prior to BuzzFeed, Syed co-founded the nation’s first media access law clinic, currently in its 10th year of operation at Yale Law School, and served as a First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. 

Nabiha has been described as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers” by Forbes magazine, and a “real reporter’s lawyer” by the Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which recognized her with an inaugural award in 2018. She is also a lifelong Girl Scout.

Jevin West is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and a member of DataLab. He builds models, algorithms and interactive visualizations for understanding the flow of information in large knowledge networks. Two particular areas of interest are scholarly communication and intellectual property. Jevin co-founded Eigenfactor.org – a free website and research platform for mapping science and identifying influential papers, journals and scholars. 

Jimmeka Anderson is a Ph.D. student in the Curriculum and Instruction Urban Education program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interest includes critical digital media literacy education and she has immersed her professional development efforts in focusing on technology inequity among historically marginalized students. She received her master’s degree in Educational Media with a focus on New Media Literacies at Appalachian State University. While serving as the Founder and Executive Director of I AM not the MEdia, Inc. for ten years, she has developed curriculum and award-winning community programs that empower youth through media literacy and media creation. Jimmeka also serves as a Project Manager for the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), Project Fellow for the Cyber Citizenship Initiative with New America, and as an Advisor for the American Library Association (ALA) Media Literacy in Libraries for Adult Audiences initiative.  

Additionally, Jimmeka is also a contractor for media literacy curriculum development with national organizations such as the Women’s Sports Foundation. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D. degree, Jimmeka worked as a Library Outreach Coordinator for ten years at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and for the past three years has served as a media literacy Course Instructor with the Carolina School of Broadcasting. Jimmeka has been featured in WIRED Magazine and in the recently released Trust Me Documentary in Fall 2020. Her recent honors include the 2018 Crowning Achiever Award from The Crown Jewels (NC) Links, Inc. and the 2019 Harlan Joel Gradin Excellence in Public Humanities Award from the NC Humanities Council. 

Kristy Roschke is the managing director of the News Co/Lab at the Cronkite School at ASU. She has taught journalism, digital media production and media literacy courses at the high school and university level for more than 15 years. She co-taught a digital media literacy massive open online course (MOOC) with News Co/Lab co-founder Dan Gillmor, which served as the basis for her doctoral dissertation at the Cronkite School. She previously served as executive director of KJZZ – SPOT 127 Youth Media Center, an award-winning community initiative of the Phoenix NPR member station that mentors and empowers the next-generation of digital storytellers. 

Imran Ahmed is the founding CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He is a recognized authority on the social and psychological dynamics of social media, as well as what goes wrong in those spaces, such as trolling, identity-based hate, misinformation, conspiracy theories, modern extremism and fake news. He regularly features in the media as an expert in online malignant behavior and how bad actors use digital spaces to harm others and benefit themselves. Imran is a trustee of the UK charity, Victim Support. He advises politicians in the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere on policy and legislation. Imran was raised in Manchester, England. He holds an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Imran lives in Washington DC, and tweets at @imi_ahmed

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.  

In her free time, Kristan enjoys escaping to the outdoors, writing, and good food and drink with friends. 

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

Jeni Arndt is a lifelong resident of Fort Collins. After attending Moore Elementary, Blevins Junior High School, and Poudre High School, she earned an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Colorado College. Soon afterwards, she earned an MA in Geography from the University of Colorado followed by an MA in Special Education from Purdue University in Indiana. After teaching special education for a few years, she earned a Ph.D. in Literacy and Language from Purdue.

Her work experience includes Congressional intern, ESL teacher, Peace Corps volunteer, secondary special education teacher, middle school principal, International Baccalaureate Coordinator, university faculty member and department head.

After moving back to Fort Collins, she served on the Commission of Disabilities as well as Childsafe before running for State Representative in 2014. After 3+ terms in the General Assembly, she was elected Mayor of Fort Collins in April, 2021.

Senator Don Coram was born and raised in Montrose County on a family farming and ranching operation along with his sister, Darla, and brother, Dwayne. While growing up, Don’s parents ran Stockyards in Montrose and Grand Junction. Senator Coram’s wife Dianna is a third generation Delta County girl. The Coram’s celebrated their 50th anniversary in October.

Senator Coram has served as Director and Treasurer on the board of School District RE -1J, Treasurer and President of the Delta-Montrose Vocational Center, member on the Board of Directors for the Western Small Miners Association and the San Juan Regional Council of the El Pomar Foundation, and most recently, Representative for Colorado House District 58. Senator Coram was appointed to serve Senate District 6 in 2017.

Toby Hopp’s research interests are broadly related to the uses and effects of digital and interactive media, the social and motivational factors that underlie uncivil online communication, and organizational transparency. Hopp’s work has appeared in a variety of scholarly outlets, including Computers in Human Behavior, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.

Hopp previously taught at the University of Alabama, where he served as an assistant professor. Prior to academia, Hopp worked as a technical writer and project manager in the healthcare industry.

Claire Levy was elected to the Board of County Commissioners in 2020, with a term continuing through January 2025, representing District 1. Prior to becoming commissioner, Claire represented Boulder, Gilpin, Clear Creek, Grand, and Jackson counties at the Colorado legislature from 2007-2013. She served as Speaker Pro Tem, Majority Whip, Vice-chair of the Joint Budget Committee, Chair of the Appropriations Committee, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and served on several ethics investigation committees.

After the legislature, she became Executive Director of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, a nonprofit that advocates for the health and economic security of low-income Coloradans.

In addition, she served the people of Boulder County for over 25 years in a volunteer capacity on the Boulder Planning Board, Boulder County Parks and Open Space and Advisory Committee, the board of PLAN Boulder County, Boulder Arts Academy, and Boulder Ballet, as well as on the board of Boulder Housing Partners, the city of Boulder’s affordable housing provider. She is a former member of the Statewide Access to Justice Commission.