Cassandra Barrett
is a genetic counselor and researcher at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute in Kansas City. She is the program manager for Genomic Answers for Kids, a large-scale pediatric genomics study and database. As a PhD student, Cassandra co-taught biology inside for two years with the Arizona State Prison Biology program. She’s since led workshops on family health history with the University of Utah Prison Education Program and has been involved with several books-through-bars programs.
Andrew Bell
is the Scheiffler Family Professor of Sustainability in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. His work applies systems thinking, modeling, and behavioral experiments to understand rural livelihoods decision making and pro-poor environmental governance. He has taught environmental science and governance in Prison Education Programs for nearly ten years, at New York University and Boston University, and now serves on the advisory board of the Cornell Prison Education Program.
George Bogner
is an alumnus of Mountainview Community College and Rutgers University – New Brunswick and holds a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Science from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and a Masters in Business and Science from Rutgers School of Graduate Studies. George excelled in research during his Princeton University REU program tenure, earning the title of Linda Rudolph Burns Memorial Scholar. Currently, he serves as an Environmental Health & Safety Associate at an environmental consulting firm. His work involves assessment of chemical, physical, and biological hazards in diverse settings, reinforcing environmental and health standards for an array of corporations. A fervent social justice advocate, George’s background, including past incarceration, complements his commitment to environmental issues and sustainability.
Adrian Borealis (formerly Lisa Voelker)
is a former science educator and equity advocate who now works in Seattle as a personal chef. They received their PhD from the University of Washington (UW) in molecular and cellular biology. While in graduate school, Adrian
Drew Fulton Bush
possesses decades of experience as nonprofit leader, researcher, and educator. Drew’s research has examined the human relationship to climate and weather as well as the means to improve public knowledge of these topics and participation in policymaking on them. Before joining Mount Washington Observatory as its Executive Director, Drew led communications and development as the Assistant Director at the Old Stone House Museum & Historic Village, educational and public programs as the Director of Programs at the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium, and an Environment and Climate Change Canada-funded project that utilizes machine learning to examine social media in relation to extreme weather. Drew earned his PhD from McGill University’s Department of Geography and Bieler School of the Environment, a master’s of Environmental Management from Duke University, and a BA from Colby College. His past work includes conducting research at the National Aeronautics and Spaces Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, NY, teaching for Cornell University/University of New Hampshire’s Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, ME, and introducing environmental science to New York University’s Prison Education Program at the Wallkill Correctional Facility in Wallkill, NY.
Sandy Chang
has taught engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Calgary, San Francisco State University, City College of San Francisco, and St. Mary’s College of California. She received her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and has focused her research on environmental fluid mechanics and engineering education. She has worked with incarcerated students through the Prison University Project and formerly incarcerated students through Project Rebound, some of whom have been her greatest sources of inspiration. She received her MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering and her BS in Geological and Environmental Sciences, both from Stanford University.
is a historian and philosopher of science. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where he thinks about the concept of information, indigenous data sovereignty, behavioral experiments, and the history of biology. Kelle volunteered with the Prison Biology Education program for two years while he was a PhD student at Arizona State University’s Center for Biology & Society.
Amalia Handler
earned her PhD in Environmental Life Sciences at Arizona State University. She taught with the Prison Biology Education Program as a graduate student for three years and co-led the program during her final year. She is an ecologist with a research program that focuses on understanding the patterns and drivers of water quality issues across the US.
Steven Hart
is an assistant teaching professor in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, where he teaches introductory biology and upper and graduate division courses in genetics. He earned his PhD in environmental engineering at ASU where he taught with the Prison Biology Education Program for six years, and co-coordinated the program for two years. He earned his BS in Biology from Murray State University.
Steven Henderson
holds a PhD and worked in brain injury rehabilitation and research. He was incarcerated for 16 and a half years. During his prison term, he worked as a GED tutor (science and writing), peer educator, treatment facilitator, and recovery support specialist. He also enrolled in classes taught through Arizona State University, including a poetry workshop, resulting in multiple published poems. He was released in 2022 and works as a medical writer and project manager with a biotechnical consulting agency.
Tiffany Hensley-McBain
is an assistant professor at the McLaughlin Research Institute and Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine- Montana. She has a passion for science education, particularly for underserved communities. She worked as an instructor with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), for which she developed a Human Biology course for incarcerated women. She also worked closely with the Science Education Partnership at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Paul Kazelis
was an incarcerated Iraq War veteran. Following his release from prison, Kazelis studied at Rutgers University where he obtained a BA in psychology and philosophy. He has testified in front of the New Jersey state legislature on criminal justice reform and voting rights for formerly incarcerated people.
Joe Lockard
is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is a nineteenth-century American literature specialist. In 2009, Lockard founded the Prison English project (now the ASU Prison Education Program). For over a decade, he taught a weekly poetry workshop at Florence State Prison. He has taught on Arizona’s death row unit, where the class organized the Florence Poetry Collective and published an eponymous journal. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in prison literature; has co-edited a volume titled Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers (Syracuse University Press, 2018); and writes on US and global narratives of incarceration, including 19th-century carceral colonialism in Arizona and an archival discovery of a 1792 civil incarceration narrative from Kentucky.
Edward Mei
interned with the Cornell Prison Education Program during 2018–2019. He digitized the program’s internal database and directory and helped create the program’s first in-facility computer labs. Prior to his internship, Mei worked as an undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the program for four semesters. He subsequently completed medical school at DGSOM at UCLA, where he studied the health needs of formerly incarcerated youth, and is now a first-year Internal Medicine-Primary Care resident at UCLA, where he aims to continue serving the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations through primary care and healthcare reform.
is a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and Biodesign Institute. Research at his laboratory is focused on protein engineering using plants as a sustainable and environmentally friendly expression system for biologics. Mor has taught >6,000 students and mentored >70 BS, MS, and PhD students and postdoctoral trainees. Mor inaugurated and runs ASU’s Prison Biology Program, a student-faculty collaborative offering a non-credit biology course at an Arizona state prison. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his postdoctoral training at Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University.
Robert Scott
is an executive director of the Cornell Prison Education Program. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, School of Integrative Plant Sciences, Horticulture Division, and is an affiliate in Education, at Cornell University. Under Scott’s leadership, the Cornell Prison Education Program has nearly tripled in size. Before coming to Cornell, Scott spent several years organizing college programs inside Illinois prisons, most notably with the Education Justice Program of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Laura Taylor
is a scientist and educator who has worked in both Washington State and Georgia to provide laboratory science classes to incarcerated individuals. She has designed and taught college-level curricula in both biology and chemistry at the Women’s Correctional Center of Washington, the Washington State Reformatory for Men, and Lee Arrendale State Prison. She has also presented best practices for delivering laboratory science courses within correctional facilities at the National Conference for Higher Education in Prisons. Beyond her teaching, Dr. Taylor is a member of the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prisons. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in molecular and cellular biology and currently works for the CDC as a biosafety inspector.
Joslyn Rose Trivett
holds a Bachelors in Natural Sciences from Evergreen State College and a Masters in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College. Joslyn worked in ecological restoration before shifting her focus to education and social services. She managed prison education programs for the Sustainability in Prisons Project from 2012–2020, building and supporting educational initiatives in
Emily Webb
is an assistant professor of Biology at Rockford University where she teaches anatomy and physiology, genetics, introductory biology, and introduction to biological research. Her research focuses on the physiology of bird color and education. Before that she earned her PhD in Biology at Arizona State University, where she was also a co-coordinator of the Prison Biology Education Program, and her BA in Zoology at Ohio Wesleyan University.