Jensen has served as the director of SNAPP since 2017. In the previous 9 years, she served The Nature Conservancy as a senior scientist and a member of SNAPP’s Science Advisory Council. She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland.
Prior to joining SNAPP, Jensen managed diverse programs including the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Migratory Bird Program at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua.
A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Jensen received her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida the effects of human activity on endemic land birds in the Kingdom of Tonga and Turks and Caicos Islands.
Geoff serves as Deputy Director of both SNAPP and NCEAS, one of SNAPP’s foundational partners. He has helped science organizations do conservation actions since 2004. He led watershed restoration projects in Northern California, managed research and education programs for the California Academy of Sciences, served as Treasurer of the Board of Directors for RE-volv (a renewable energy non-profit), and was a Fellow with both the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps and the Coro Center for Civic Leadership.
While completing a Master’s in Conservation Planning with the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara, Geoff worked with Northern Californian ranchers to identify feasible ways to minimize local wolf-livestock conflicts and support coexistence with this predator.
Julien Brun is a scientific programmer at NCEAS, where he assists scientific research according to data science best practices. The core of his work is to understand and solve working group participants’ data and computing challenges. He advises and trains groups on how to clean, structure, combine and analyze their heterogeneous data sets, as well as scaling their analysis. He is also an instructor for NCEAS’ data science trainings, helping scientists improve their programming and data management skills.
Julien’s scientific expertise is in ecohydrology, Earth observation techniques (remote sensing and GIS) and process-based models. Prior to conducting his PhD on the ecohydrological impacts of tropical cyclones in the Southeastern US, he conducted several projects on land cover change, vegetation monitoring and disaster mapping for governmental and international institutions.
Benita Hussain is the Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Conservation Solutions division, which focuses on three of WCS’s cross-cutting efforts: Climate Change, Food & Economic Security, and Sustainable Business. Prior, Benita was a public affairs director at Bloomberg Philanthropies, where she helped shape Mike Bloomberg’s global agenda on cities and climate change, and was also a climate advisor to the late-Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Benita earned a Bachelors in Environmental Studies from Cornell University and has a law degree from Fordham University School of Law. An avid surfer and swimmer living in Brooklyn with her husband and son, her travel and environmental writing has appeared in Outside Magazine, SIERRA, GOOD, and the Boston Globe.
Jessica is a Governance Economist with Global Science at The Nature Conservancy, where she focuses on integrating social and economic science into conservation practice. Her work involves developing and piloting approaches to integrate human-wellbeing considerations into planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of conservation projects. Jessica led the design and implementation of the first devolved social monitoring system to track the impacts of conservation on pastoralists in the community conservancies of northern Kenya. She has worked on beef supply chain sustainability and is currently exploring the role of tenure security in conservation programs.
Prior to joining the Nature Conservancy, Jessica worked on grassland ecosystem service valuation and developing payments for ecosystem service programs accessible to ranchers. Jessica has extensive field experience having conducted research on natural resource and development issues in Africa and USA on topics that include game ranching, smallholder agriculture, community based natural resource management and fisheries management. Jessica holds a PhD and MSc in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, and a BSc in Agricultural Economics from the University of Zimbabwe.
