The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has selected the University of Oregon’s Alai Reyes-Santos as a member of its planning committee for a national workshop on enhancing the responses to climate change.

Reyes-Santos is a professor of practice in the School of Law and associate director of the Just Futures Institute.

She is one of 13 scholars selected from a nationwide nomination process to contribute to the planning and execution of a multiday workshop to “consider how to integrate, align, and converge the broad mix of social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences to produce new insights and inform efforts for enhanced human responses to environmental change.” The workshop’s title is  “Integrating the Human Sciences to Scale Societal Responses to Environmental Change.”

The effort will bring together leading researchers to identify how best to mobilize and apply broad bodies of knowledge in psychology, decision science and other disciplines to address climate and environmental change, as well as how to address key gaps in community-led efforts focused on environmental justice.

Along with John Arroyo, the Just Futures Institute director, Reyes-Santos received the Racial Equity and Sustainability Collaborations Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Reyes-Santos’ research and community engagement efforts center on environmental justice. She works with community and university partners to disseminate environmental research in accessible formats through public scholarship, media interventions, op-eds and digital platforms.

She co-developed the Oregon Water Futures Collaborative, as well as the Healers Project. Those are both multidisciplinary initiatives that facilitate storytelling and community empowerment as well as leadership development, public education and scientific research that directly affect how historically underserved communities address climate and environmental change.