Husky Social and Panel | Innovative Climate Solutions: From Forests to Materials

Alshakim Nelson received his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004, where he worked with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart on carbohydrate-containing polymers and macrocycles. He was then an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology working for Professor Robert Grubbs on olefin metathesis catalysts for the formation of supramolecular ensembles. Dr. Nelson joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 2005 as a Research Staff Member where he focused on the synthesis of nanomaterial building blocks that enabled large area nanomanufacturing via self-assembly. In 2015, Dr. Nelson joined the faculty at the UW, where his interdisciplinary research group focuses on the synthesis, characterization, and processing of stimuli-responsive materials for 3D printing. These materials are centered around applications in medicine, soft robotics, sensors, and sustainability. His honors and awards include recognition as an IBM Master Inventor, ACS PMSE Young Investigator, Kavli Foundation Fellow, NSF CAREER award, and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.

Abigail Swann is an atmospheric scientist and ecologist who is interested in the transitions, thresholds, and feedbacks of the coupled ecosystem-climate system, or ecoclimate. More specifically, she works to understand when, where, and how plants influence the climate across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Her theoretical interests lead her to such questions as: how will changes in agricultural area create feedbacks in climate? Or, what processes control the response of climate to vegetation in different regions of the world? As such, her work is global in scale, considering the interactions between terrestrial ecosystems not only on their local environment, but also on other regions connected to the local ecosystem through atmospheric circulation.

Theo has cultivated his career by asking how to create systems that prioritize people and the planet — moving from an extractive business model to one of regeneration. He co-founded Cambium with those principles to cultivate a new way of doing business that creates a more just and sustainable future. Prior to Cambium, he was a Thomas Watson Fellow, traveling the world to explore sustainable food systems, and a first team all-American goalkeeper at Colorado College. Both formative experiences that help build teams, problem solve, and think outside the box.

Cambium is growing the modern forest products economy by connecting more wasted and underutilized material into the supply chain through physical products and digital tools.