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On this episode, Dr. Jennifer L. Verdolin returns to Heartwood, this time in the era of COVID-19. Dr. Verdolin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona and an expert in animal behavior. The author of two books, including Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Tell Us About Human Relationships and Raised by Animals: The Surprising New Science of Animal Family Dynamics, she draws on animal behavior to reveal how much we can learn from other species to improve our relationships, families, and lives. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, NPR, Slate, The Washington Post, and National Geographic. Jennifer was a featured guest on the D.L. Hughley Show from 2014-2018 and is a frequent media guest on other radio and podcast shows. She enjoys engaging the public and speaks at places like the 92nd St Y and universities around the country. She also consults for television production companies in the US and abroad.

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Allison Mathews is Associate Director of Integrating Special Populations at Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity. Her research interests include community engagement, the sociology of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion, HIV/AIDS, and social psychology. Her current research examines the use of crowdsourcing theory to implement community engagement activities aimed at facilitating discussion about the social and ethical aspects of curing HIV (searcHIV).

Allison Mathews’ postdoctoral work has developed the 2BeatHIV project, which is a research project focused on empowering local and global communities to shape the future of HIV cure research. The project hosts a series of crowdsourcing contests that encourage community members to use art, technology, and music to develop HIV cure marketing campaigns (see 2BeatHIV.org for more info). The project has reached over 1000 people at in-person events and over 350K unique users online. 2BeatHIV has also received local and national media attention, including volunteer interviews with Viola Davis, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Bun B from UGK, Shirley Ceasar, David and Tamela Mann, Johnny Gill, and a host of Radio One Raleigh radio personalities.

She was a Humphreys Fellow and earned her PhD in Sociology in 2015 at UNC Chapel Hill. Her dissertation research focused on the role that stigma attached to being Black and gay played in Black gay men’s strategies to manage identity conflict while maintaining connections to churches. Allison was inducted into the Frank Porter Graham Graduate and Professional Honor Sociology in 2013 for her service to the local community and university and received the Everett K. Wilson Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2014 for her excellence in teaching.

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Marcelo Bonta was originally trained as a conservation biologist, and ended up shifting his career focus from biodiversity to people diversity after finding himself as the sole programmatic person of color at a national conservation organization. That experience was so bad that he didn’t want anything to do with the environmental movement ever again. However, he realized he could not abandon what he loved—those cute little puffy baby piping plovers and all my brothers and sisters having oppressive experiences with environmental organizations. Since the environmental movement could not be successful and sustainable until it got this J.E.D.I. thing right, he went all in. His experiences led him to co-create the Center for Diversity & the Environment, which he ran for a decade, providing transformational trainings for thousands of leaders and organizational change processes for dozens of institutions. He also co-founded the Environmental Professionals of Color, a network for leaders of color to survive, thrive, lead, and innovate.