Great Lakes Water Conference Speaker Profiles
24th Annual Great Lakes Water Conference
"Climate Migration in the Great Lakes Region"
Friday, Nov. 8, 2024
Panel One
Beth Gibbons
Beth Gibbons brings a unique blend of regional passion and national and international experience working on climate resilience. For over 15 years, Beth has focused her career on how to make climate information usable and useful and building programs and organizations that recognize the unmatched expertise that communities and individuals have about their own risks and resources. In 2017, Beth began pushing for the states and cities of the Great Lakes region to begin thinking differently about climate change. She advocates for a perspective that recognizes the risks communities face, but also pushes leaders to realize that climate change presents opportunities for the region to grow and thrive. In August of 2024 Beth became the director of the Resiliency Office for Washtenaw County, MI.
Keith Hirokawa
Keith Hirokawa serves as Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School. He teaches courses involving environmental and natural resources law, land use planning, climate change, property law, and jurisprudence. His scholarship explores convergences in ecology, ethics, economics, geography, and law, with particular attention given to local environmental law, ecosystem services policy, watershed management, and racial justice. Hirokawa studied philosophy and law at the University of Connecticut, where he earned his J.D. and M.A. degrees. He earned his LL.M. in Environmental and Natural Resources Law from Lewis and Clark Law School. His recent publications include ENVIRONMENTAL LAW, DISRUPTED., Keith H. Hirokawa and Jessica Owley, eds. (Environmental Law Institute, 2021); The Climate Haven, __ OHIO ST. L. J. __ (With Cinnamon Carlarne) (Forthcoming 2025); Disrupting Dominance, 56 CONN L. REV. 133 (With Cinnamon Carlarne) (2024); Climate Dominance, 35 GEORGETOWN ENV. L. REV. 485 (With Cinnamon P. Carlarne) (2024); The Climate Moratorium, 11 TEX A and M L. REV. 365 (With Cinnamon Carlarne) (2024); and Race, Space and Place: Interrogating Whiteness Through a Critical Approach to Place, 29 W. and M. J. OF RACE, GENDER, AND SOC. J. 279 (2023).
Shana Tabak
Shana Tabak is Emerson Collective’s Director, Immigration Strategy, where she leads engagement at the intersection of global migration and the climate crisis. She also serves as adjunct professor at Georgetown Law and Affiliated Scholar with Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, where she teaches courses on human rights, refugee and migration law, and climate justice. She serves as an advisory member to the Platform on Disaster Displacement. Prior to joining Emerson, Tabak served as Founding Executive Director of the Tahirih Justice Center Atlanta, where she built a nonprofit that became a leading voice on immigrant rights, gender, and asylum litigation. Since 2010, Tabak has taught at human rights and immigration law clinics and has extensive human rights advocacy and strategic litigation experience before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, United Nations human rights mechanisms, and in U.S. court. As a clinical law professor, she led litigation at the International Human Rights Clinics at American University and George Washington University on LGBTIAQ+ rights, climate justice, and refugee rights. She has lectured at Emory Law, Georgia State Law, the University of Georgia School of Law, Universidad de Antioquia, (Medellin, Colombia) and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Cali, Colombia). Her work and commentary have been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, CNN, HBO, NPR, and El País, among others. Tabak has a JD from Georgetown University with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies, where she was recognized as a Public Interest Law Scholar, an LL.M. from George Washington University, and a BA from Macalester College. Tabak clerked on the International Court of Justice in the Hague and studied migration and international development in Bolivia as a Fulbright Scholar.
Panel Two
Cinnamon Carlarne
Cinnamon Carlarne is the 19th President and Dean at Albany Law School, where she is also a professor. Her research focuses on questions of domestic and international environmental law, centering on climate change law and climate justice. Her scholarship includes key books in the field of climate change law, including, Climate Change Law with Dan Farber, and The Oxford Handbook of International Climate Change Law, as well as a monograph on comparative climate change law and policy with Oxford University Press, a casebook on international environmental law, a textbook on oceans and human health and numerous articles, book chapters, and essays on questions of domestic and international environmental law, with a particular focus on question of climate change and climate justice. She is on the advisory boards for Transnational Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press) and Climate Law (IOS Press). She was the co-chair of the American Society for International Law’s Climate Law signature topic working group and serves on various climate-focused academic and policy boards. Prior to joining Albany Law School, she was the Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life and the Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where she also chaired the University Research Committee and served on the Executive Steering Committee for The Ohio State Sustainability Institute. She earned her BCL and an M.S. in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar; a J.D. from Berkeley Law; and her B.A. from Baylor University. Prior to joining Ohio State, she was a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, the Harold Woods Fellow in Environmental Law at Wadham College, Oxford, and an attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld in Washington, D.C.
Scott Kalafatis
Scott Kalafatis is the Deputy University Director of the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center affiliated with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington. Dr. Kalafatis is a social scientist whose research has focused on climate adaptation efforts in cities and in Tribal communities, the support that collaborations between scientists and decisionmakers provide these efforts, and how regional adaption training and capacity building translate into local climate action. Dr. Kalafatis holds M.A.s in Environmental Policy and Urban Planning and a Ph.D. in Resource Policy and Behavior from the University of Michigan and has over a decade of experience working as a researcher with the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments.