Emelia (she/they) is the Policy and Research Associate at Open Environmental Data Project, first joining in 2020 as the Civic Voice Fellow to support the initiative through research and prototype design. She is passionate about learning the ways local knowledge and data can confront the climate crisis and multiple pollution emergencies, and how to build more equitable systems in the process. They were a Civic Science Fellow with the Rita Allen Foundation and hold a master’s degree in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, specializing in climate and natural resource policy.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
The EPA should better integrate community data into environmental research and governance by building internal capacity for recognizing and applying such data, facilitating connections between data communities, and addressing misalignments with data standards.