Make Time For the Future

Paul Kirshen has thirty years of experience serving as principal investigator/ project manager of complex, interdisciplinary, participatory research related to water resources and coastal zone management and climate variability and change. He is presently a professor in the School for the Environment at UMass Boston. Prior to this he was a research professor at the Environmental Research Group of Department of Civil Engineering and the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has served as Climate Change Adaptation Research Leader at Battelle Memorial Institute. From 1996 to 2009, he was a research professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at Tufts University and director and co-founder of the Water: Systems, Science, and Society (WSSS) Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program. He is also a lead author for the 2014 Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment and the 2013 US National Climate Assessment, is a member of ICLEI USA– Local Governments for Sustainability’s Climate Adaptation Steering Committee, and a member of the Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Advisory Committee and its Coastal Zone and Ocean Subcommittee.

James Hughes Ph.D. is a bioethicist and sociologist, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), which he co-founded with philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2004. James also serves as the Associate Provost for Institutional Research, Assessment and Planning for the University of Massachusetts Boston. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and from 1999-2011 he produced the syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio.

Lee Vinsel is a professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. With Andrew L. Russell, he is a founders of the Maintainers research network and conferences, and authors of The Innovation Delusion. Their work and writing on the topic of maintenance have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and WIRED magazine.

Cristina Parreño Alonso is an architect, designer, and educator at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT where her research Transtectonics explores cultural and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. Her tectonic translations—material transfers across mediums and temporal scales, human and more-than-human—embody narratives that are told in the form of essays, exhibitions, and through architectural projects and installations that activate public spaces. Her firm, Cristina Parreño Architecture, has won several awards and architectural competitions. In 2014 she obtained the European award “40 under 40”. In 2015 she was selected emerging firm at the “Design Boston Biennial” where she exhibited her piece “Tectonics of Transparency: The Tower”. In 2017 she was selected by the City of Boston to install the permanent art installation “Deep Time Stories of JP” in the Hyde Square of Jamaica Plain in Boston. Her work was on view at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, in 2020, and she is one of the architects exhibiting in La Biennale di Venezia, 2021. As well as MIT Cristina has taught design studios at the State University of NY at Buffalo and Harvard GSD.

Andrew L. Russell is a professor of history and the dean of the College of Arts and Science at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. With Lee Vinsel, he is a founder of the Maintainers research network and conferences, and authors of The Innovation Delusion. Their work and writing on the topic of maintenance have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and WIRED magazine.

Preston is the founder and Chief Scientist of the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC), the first-ever open-source vaccine project. Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, RaDVaC created rapid-deployment vaccines and published all formulas and protocols on the internet to enable production and self-administration of RaDVaC vaccines. Prior to RaDVaC, Preston was the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Veritas Genetics. He is an inventor of several technologies, and is an adviser to many biotech startup companies. Preston was a previous Long Now Boston speaker on DNA technology breakthroughs: Our Past is our Future.