Chair: Gabi Mocatta

Gabi is an interdisciplinary academic who researches communicational responses to climate change. She is Senior Research Fellow in Climate Science Communication with the Climate Futures group at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Gabi’s work takes place at the site where climate change science, public understanding and collective discourse on climate change and environmental policy intersect. Gabi is a research leader for Natural Hazards Research Australia, and collaborates on other award-winning projects including the Media and Climate Change Observatory and Curious Climate Schools. Gabi is a 2024/2025 Fulbright Fellow.

Vice Chair: Dara M. Wald 

Dara is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Her work examines the drivers of conflict and barriers to effective communication in natural resource contexts. Dara's work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and supported by competitive grants, including the 2022 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. Dara is an associate editor for Science and Environmental Communication, a Frontiers special section. She received her PhD from the University of Florida and previously led the Science Communication Project at Iowa State University.

Treasurer: Steve Depoe

Steve is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the co-editor of a book series on Media and Environmental Communication published by Palgrave MacMillan. He was the founding editor of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, and the founding chair of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). His research areas include environmental and risk communication, particularly the role of the public in environmental decision-making and public communication. Steve teaches courses in Environmental Communication, Communication and Sport, Rhetoric of Social Movements, Rhetorical Research Methods, and Advanced Rhetorical Theory.

Outgoing Secretary: Mira Rochyadi-Reetz

Mira is faculty staff at the Media Research and Political Communication research group of the Technische Universitat Ilmenau in Germany. Her research interests are on framing climate change, renewable energy, and sustainability. More information about her publication and teaching activities can be found here.

Journal Editor: Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Phaedra is an associate professor at the University of Colorado. Her research focuses on the mobilization of resistance to toxic pollution, the communication of resilience in what she calls “the late age of fossil fuels,” and the advocacy of environmental and social justice. With interdisciplinary training in the humanities and the sciences, she engages in ethnographic participant observation fieldwork, qualitative interviews, popular texts across media, news archives, government documents and contemporary critical theoretical perspectives.

Graduate Student Representative: Ella Muncie

Ella is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, in the Department of Media and Communication. She is currently completing an ESRC funded collaborative studentship with Greenpeace International focusing on the campaign strategies of the Alternative Futures campaign. She is particularly interested in the framing of environmental movements and their use of emerging digital media platforms.

Conference Committee Chair: Tema Milstein

Tema is Professor of Environment & Society at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is known for cultural approaches to studying how communication shapes ecological understandings, identities, and actions. Her work tends to discourses that otherwise go unnoticed, to connections between discourses and wider destructive or restorative practices, and to paths toward just and regenerative futures. Her work includes the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020, with co-editor José Castro-Sotomayor) and Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (2017, with co-editors Mairi Pileggi & Eric Morgan).

Outreach Committee Chair: Sibo Chen

Sibo is an Assistant Professor at the School of Professional Communication, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. His current research explores how political polarization is communicated in the public sphere, focusing on climate change, energy transition, online mis/disinformation, and anti-Asian racism.

Research Committee Chair: Kundai Chirindo

Kundai is Associate Professor and Chair of Rhetoric and Media Studies as well as Director of General Education at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA. Born in Zimbabwe, his research deals with the discursive practices that contest, contribute to, and ultimately constitute the ideas of Africa in American public life. Through exploring those themes, he broadly engages in discussions across rhetorical studies, environmental communication, African and African American studies, Linguistics, and Black studies.

Elected Member: Etsuko Kinefuchi

Etsuko is a professor of Communication Studies and affiliated faculty with Geography, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is interested in ecojustice and multispecies approaches to the creation of a life-affirming world. At UNC Greensboro, she chairs the Sustainability Council and previously served as the Academic Sustainability Coordinator. Etsuko is a native of Niigata, Japan and lives in Greensboro, NC (USA), the traditional lands of the Catawba, Keyauwee and Saura Nations.

Awards Committee Chair: Hanna E. Morris

Hanna is an Assistant Professor of Climate Change Communication at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. She researches climate media and communication, culture and climate politics, transnational climate movements, and authoritarianism and the climate crisis. Her research and writing have been published in various academic journals and popular media outlets, including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, Places Journal, Reading The Pictures, and Earth Island Journal. 

Elected Member: Bruno Takahashi 

Bruno is the Brandt Professor of Environmental Communication at Michigan State University with a joint appointment in the School of Journalism and AgBioResearch.  Dr. Takahashi is also the research director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. His research interests include environmental journalism practices, inclusive science communication, and the communication of environmental issues in Latin America media and US Latino media.

Elected Member: Anke Wonneberger

Anke is an associate professor in corporate communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands. Her current research topics include strategic communication of nonprofit organizations and mediated environmental discourses. She is particularly interested in the role of environmental nonprofit organizations and social movements in public discourses, for instance, on climate change, renewable energies, and animal welfare. Anke teaches strategic communication and sustainability communication courses in the Communication Science master's program at the UvA.