Environmental & Social Justice

Maria Lopez Vazquez is a multicultural landscape designer from the border region of Tijuana-San Diego (MX-US). She has a Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. By pursuing her Master's in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, she hopes to inform her landscape design practice with sustainable efforts as an artist and maker.

Eric Medina studies how coastal wetland restoration can improve habitat, protect urban spaces, and increase access to green space. He is excited about the opportunities climate adaptation presents for envisioning futures that prioritize both the ecological systems California’s cities rely on and the daily quality of life for people.

Mica Caine is the co-founder of Helix, a circular fashion marketplace focused on keeping clothing, care, and stories in motion within local communities. A Central Ohio native, Mica’s work is deeply rooted in place and relationships, spanning circular economy, community-led climate resilience, and decentralized energy systems.

Sena Wazer is a community organizer and advocate from Connecticut. Her work centers around community organizing as a mechanism for creating policy change, particularly at the state level.

Based in rural Northern California and informed by his Choctaw heritage, Logan White works with tribal communities at the nexus of environmental stewardship and behavioral health to address the intergenerational trauma colonialism has left in its wake. He calls this approach “restoration therapy,” a practice that treats ecological restoration as both practical healing for the land and a living metaphor for strengthening individual and community wellness.

Cindy Nguyen is a proud first-generation, Vietnamese-American dedicated to building a more healthy, just, and equitable world for all. Motivated by her experiences observing environmental-health burdens in Vietnamese nail salons, Cindy hopes to use legal tools to both confront the systems driving environmental-health inequities and empower historically overburdened communities to build their own versions of a just future.

Malika Kounkourou serves as a managing editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review and is a research assistant at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program. Her interests lie at the intersection of alternative dispute resolution systems, corporate accountability, and climate justice, with a focus on extractive industry governance.

Maya Caine is a slow fashion entrepreneur focused on designing life-affirming systems that prioritize longevity, circularity, and justice. With a background in corporate strategy and systems thinking, she has spent the past seven years building slow and circular fashion solutions that challenge the industry’s dependence on overproduction and waste.

Sarah Sarfaty Epstein is interested in landscape-scale climate resilience decision making in California’s agricultural sector, particularly at the agriculture-energy-water nexus. Her current research uses geospatial analysis to create decision support tools at the groundwater basin level. Born and raised in the East Bay, she is proud to call California home.