Dr. Sophia B Liu is an interdisciplinary Innovation Specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) working with the Science and Decisions Center (SDC); the Mineral Resources Program (MRP); the Energy and Minerals, and Environmental Health (EM-EH) Mission Areas; and the Office of Enterprise Information (OEI). She worked at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC), the St. Petersburg Coastal Marine Science Center, and the Energy, Minerals, and Environmental Health programs at the USGS National Center as a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow conducting research on crowdsourcing, citizen science, and civic hacking. Dr. Liu applies human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) techniques to the fields of crisis informatics and earth science. She investigates the social and behavioral uses of information and communication technology (ICT) around disasters to inform the design of future crowdsourcing projects, citizen science, and civic hacking efforts that improve government services. She also explores the opportunities and challenges with integrating data from the general public and how data science is enabling the communication of information and science online in more interactive ways. Dr. Liu was also awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship in 2006. Her doctorate research at the University of Colorado at Boulder focused on the use of social media pertaining to historically significant crises and the emergence of socially distributed curation as a way of managing crisis information in the social media landscape. She has given numerous invited talks on the emerging use of social technology for emergency management and the rise of open innovation through crowdsourcing and citizen science. As an innovation specialist and user experience researcher, Dr. Liu investigates the Socio-cultural, Technological, Organizational, and Policy (STOP) interfaces that need to be redesigned to improve government services.
Lauralee Barbaria is the Associate Director for the Environmental Finance Center West. She has an MBA in Sustainable Enterprise and is the past Director of Dominican University’s GreenMBA program. Her executive management and leadership expertise gathered from 25 years in the financial, hi-tech and health care industries reflect her success as a change agent working with organizations and communities of all sizes domestically and internationally.
Her experience with a wide variety of hands-on tools and communication methods help individuals and teams and organizations to identify and implement techniques and strategies to build capacities, partnerships and gather support for complex challenges. Most recently Lauralee co-facilitated leadership and internal/external communications training to water systems and government agencies based in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico, California, Montana, North Carolina, Kansas, Hawaii, Alaska, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia among others to gather support for water initiatives.
Lauralee has provided multiple workshops in Latin America to participants from Brazil, Argentina and Columbia focusing on the business case to integrate sustainability into operational efficiencies, strategic plans and entrepreneur business ideas.
Please join Lauralee for one or both of these half-day workshops during this year’s NYGeoCON!
At this time presentation submissions are closed – thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! The full agenda is now available on the Agenda page.