Joining Science and Theology to End Plastic Pollution, Protect Health, and Advance Social Justice

David Quigley, PhD, MA

David Quigley was named Provost and Dean of Faculties for Boston College in 2014. A distinguished historian, teacher, and scholar, Quigley demonstrated strong academic leadershipsince arriving at BC in 1998, serving as the dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

He was credited with recruiting an outstanding cohort of young faculty, enhancing academic opportunities for undergraduate students, and developing new interdisciplinary majors in environmental studies and Islamic civilization and societies.

Quigley also played a significant role in the conceptualization and design of Stokes Hall, the center of the humanities at Boston College, and in the ongoing effort to renew the undergraduate core curriculum. Colleagues praised his interdisciplinary and cross-school collaboration for initiatives such as Teachers for a New Era with the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the Portico program in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management.

A graduate of Amherst College with an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, Quigley’s research and writing on 19th-century American history have earned him several prestigious academic fellowships, and he was recognized by Boston College with the University-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007.

His research to date has explored the history of race and democracy between the American Revolution and Reconstruction in the local political cultures of New York.

Katherine E. Gregory, PhD, RN, FAAN

Katherine E. Gregory was named dean at the William F. Connell School of Nursing on July 1, 2021. Dr. Gregory was previously the associate chief nursing officer, women’s and newborn health, research, and innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

As a researcher, Gregory has worked with a diverse set of scientists across multiple disciplines from a wide range of institutions, and has secured both National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Nursing Research funding from 2003 through 2024. In 2009, through the generosity of University Trustee Kathleen Haley and her husband Stephen, Gregory helped establish the Haley Nurse Scientist Program, a partnership between the Connell School of Nursing (CSON) and Brigham and Women’s (BWH) that funded clinical nurses at BWH and nursing faculty at CSON to engage in scholarly activities and lead clinical research while strengthening holistic care provided to patients and families. She was selected as the inaugural Haley Nurse Scientist.

More recently, Gregory served as scientific founder of an early-stage company that aims to improve preterm infant nutrition and growth outcomes through software designed to optimize nursing care and clinical workflows, resulting in a patent issued in 2020. She has helped to raise more than $5 million in funding for the venture, while gaining invaluable experience in nurse-led innovation and entrepreneurship.

Prior to being named the associate chief nursing officer at Brigham and Women’s, Gregory served as associate director of research in pediatric newborn medicine, and director of newborn care redesign. She continues to serve as a senior scientist in pediatric newborn medicine at BWH. She is also the editor of the Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing.

Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, FAAP

At Boston College, Philip J. Landrigan is Director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program and director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. He is a pediatrician, public health physician, and epidemiologist. Author of over 700 scientific publications and 10 books, in his research he uses the tools of epidemiology to elucidate connections between toxic chemicals and human health, especially the health of infants and children. He is particularly interested in understanding how toxic chemicals injure the developing brains and nervous systems of children and in translating this knowledge into public policy to protect health.

In New York City, he worked for many years in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and he was involved in the medical and epidemiologic follow-up of 20,000 9/11 rescue workers. From 2015 to 2017, he co-chaired the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. He is also member of the National Institute of Medicine.

Summer Sherburne Hawkins, Ph.D., MS

Summer Sherburne Hawkins joined the Boston College School of Social Work (BCSSW) faculty in 2012. She is a social epidemiologist with an interest in addressing policy-relevant research questions in women’s and children’s health. Her research examines the impact of policies on health disparities in parents and children, particularly using methodology that integrates epidemiology and economics. She uses applied econometric techniques to evaluate natural experiments created through policy changes within and between U.S. states, including substance use policies, reproductive health-related policies, breastfeeding policies, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Hawkins has published in prominent peer-reviewed public health journals on the topics of tobacco and cannabis use, maternal morbidity and mortality, infant feeding practices, and preventive health services, as well as the impact of state policies on disparities in these health behaviors and outcomes.

At Boston College, Hawkins is the Assistant Director of the Institute of Early Childhood Policy and Associate Director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good. She is also on the editorial boards for BMC Public Health and Maternal and Child Nutrition.

Prior to joining BCSSW, Hawkins was a Cohort 7 Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2009 to 2011.

Karen Bullock, PhD, LICSW, FGSA, APHSW-C

Karen Bullock is the Louise McMahon Ahearn Endowed Professor in the Boston College School of Social Work and in the program Global Public Health and the Common Good. She is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Work (LICSW) with mental health practice experience and expertise in health disparities, health equity, serious illness care, aging and gerontology, hospice, palliative and end-of-life care decision making. She has served as Principal Investigator and/or Co-Investigator for over $5 million in federal grant funding focused on equity and inclusion for workforce development, aging, and health network sustainability.

Dr. Bullock is a John A. Hartford Faculty Scholar and has served on several national boards and committees, including the Social Work Hospice and Palliative Care Network (SWHPN) as vice-chair and the American Cancer Society (ACS) Oncology Social Work Research Peer Review Committee, past chair. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Roundtable on Quality Care for People with Serious Illness, a board member of the Palliative Care Quality Collaborative (PCQ), Steering Committee member for the Duke University REACH Equity Center, affiliate faculty at the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), and has an appointment in the Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care at Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI).

Judith Enck

Judith Enck is President of Beyond Plastics, which she founded in 2019 to end plastic pollution through education, advocacy, and institutional change. Passionate about protecting public health and the environment, she is also Professor at Bennington College. 

Enck grew up in a working-class family in the Catskill Mountains and put herself through college. Since then, she has held top influential positions in state and federal government. Appointed by President Obama, she served as the Regional Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing environmental protection in NY, NJ, eight Indian Nations, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands–in addition to managing a staff of 800 and a $700M budget.

Previously, Enck served as Deputy Secretary for the Environment in the New York Governor’s Office, and Policy Advisor to the New York State Attorney General. She was Senior Environmental Associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group, served as Executive Director for Environmental Advocates of New York and is a past President of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Enck is also a panelist on a public affairs radio show on a local NPR station, WAMC, in Albany, NY.

Willis Jenkins, Ph.D.

Willis Jenkins lives in the Rivanna River watershed (Monacan land), where he works as Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

He is author of two award-winning books: Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology, which won a Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity, which won an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence. He is co-editor of several books, including the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, and many essays along intersections of religion, ethics, and environmental humanities. Jenkins co-directs the Coastal Futures Conservatory, which integrates arts and humanities into coastal change research at the National Science Foundation’s Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research site.

Thomas C. Chiles, PhD, BS

Thomas C. Chiles is DeLuca Professor in Biology and Vice Provost for Research and Academic Planning at Boston College. He received his B.S. in Microbiology and Cell Science from the University of Florida, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida College of Medicine. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at Boston University School of Medicine in the Immunology/Oncology Training Program, as a Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA fellow.

At Boston College, he served as Chair of the Biology Department. He also served on several National Institutes of Health study sections, including Hypersensitivity, Autoimmune and Immune-mediated Diseases and on the Cancer Biology special emphasis panel at the National Cancer Institute.

He was member of numerous editorial boards, including as Section Editor for the Journal of Immunology, as well as of the American Association of Immunologists and American Society of Hematologists. He is currently serving on the editorial board of Frontiers in Immunology and served on the Lancet Commission on Pollution, Health and Development in partnership with the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Sarah Dunlop, PhD, BSc

Emeritus Professor Sarah Dunlop joined Minderoo Foundation in 2020 to set up and lead the Plastics and Human Health Impact Mission to establish a causal link between plastics and negative human health impacts and a pathway to safe and sustainable alternative materials by 2030. 

In collaboration with world-leading research partners, the Minderoo Foundation synthesizes evidence from published scientific literature with outputs including the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, the Plastic Health Map and an Umbrella Review evaluating impacts on human health from major classes of plastic-associated chemicals. Moreover, the Minderoo Foundation also accelerates discovery where critical evidence is lacking by supporting randomized controlled clinical trials (e.g., Plastics Exposure Reduction Transforms Health, PERTH) and hybrid epidemiological studies as well as delivering accurate measurement techniques for nanoplastics and plastic-associated chemicals in humans.

Dunlop’s prior medical research career focused on brain development and recovery following chemical and physical injury to the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nervous system, including randomized controlled trials. Her senior roles included: Accorded Status, Royal Perth Hospital; Director, Spinal Cord Injury Network; President, Australian Neuroscience Society; Head, School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia.

Hervé Raps, MD

Hervé Raps is the Research Delegate Physician at the Monaco Scientific Center, where he leads the Clinical Research support activity and the “Ocean and Human Health” theme. He is conducting awareness-raising and capacity-building activities on environmental health issues, particularly those related to the oceans, for a range of stakeholders. He has been on the steering committee and among the authors of the Monaco Commission on Ocean Pollution and Human Health and the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the “Espace Ethique PACA Corse” and the Scientific Council of Académie 3 at the Université Côte d’Azur in France.

David A. Wirth, JD

David A. Wirth is a professor and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, where he has served as Director of International Programs. He teaches primarily in the field of public international law. He has a particularly strong research interest in international environmental law, an area in which he has worked and practiced for more than two decades. In addition to Boston College, he has taught at Harvard, M.I.T., Oxford, Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the University of Virginia.

Prior to moving to academia, Wirth was Senior Attorney and Co-Director of the International Program at the Washington, D.C. office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit public interest law firm specializing in environmental issues. While there, he worked on a variety of international environmental issues, including environmental reform of World Bank and regional development banks, the “greenhouse” effect, Soviet and eastern European environmental issues, stratospheric ozone depletion, and exports of hazardous substances.

Wirth has also been Attorney-Adviser for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., where he had principal responsibility for all international environmental issues, including exports of hazardous substances and technologies, acid rain, and stratospheric ozone depletion. In his positions at the Department of State and NRDC, Wirth had extensive experience in multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and other international organizations.

A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Wirth has served on advisory boards to several institutions of higher learning, domestic agencies, and international organizations, including Vermont Law School, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He has been a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environment Program, North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, C.S. Mott Foundation, German Marshall Fund of the United States, and Belgian State Secretary for Energy and Sustainable Development.

A prolific writer, Wirth is the author of more than fifty articles and reports on international environmental law and policy for legal, academic, professional, and popular audiences. He is co-author of major new editions of legal texts on international organizations and environmental law.  Wirth is currently at work on a scholarly treatise on the role of science in international trade law.  His published work has appeared in numerous highly respected journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Foreign Policy, and American Journal of International Law.

Wirth is a 1981 graduate of the Yale Law School and served as law clerk to Judge William H. Timbers of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York for a year thereafter. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from, respectively, Princeton University and Harvard University, at which he held a National Science Foundation Fellowship. During the summer of 1997, he was a Fulbright Scholar through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Regional Research Program.

Margaret Spring, JD

Margaret Spring, the Chief Conservation and Science Officer for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, oversees the aquarium’s many conservation and science programs that advance healthy oceans through policy, markets, and research. These programs span the Aquarium’s global initiatives to advance sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, including the Seafood Watch program, its work to advance U.S. and California ocean conservation priorities, as well as its related research, including collaborations with the Aquarium’s research and technology partner, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

Prior to joining the Aquarium, she held leadership roles at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), first as chief of staff and then as principal deputy undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere, and she led The Nature Conservancy's California coastal and marine program. From 1999 to 2007, she served on Capitol Hill as senior counsel, then general counsel to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. 

Spring serves on the board of the California Ocean Science Trust, a nonprofit organization tasked with providing rigorous science to guide decisions about the future of California’s coast and ocean. She also serves on the board of the Environmental Law Institute and is a founding board member of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. Previously she served on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council. From 1992 to 1999, she was an environmental attorney at Sidley and Austin in Washington, D.C. She is a graduate of Duke University Law School and Dartmouth College.

Pushpam Kumar, PhD

Pusphpam Kumar is Senior Economic Advisor for the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), where he leads various initiatives: Inclusive Wealth, Planetary Crisis and Human Development, Financing of Sustainable Development Goals, Nature Based Solutions, Restoration Finance, Human and Planetary Health, among others. In the past he has worked as the Chief of the Ecosystem Services Economics Unit, and as Coordinator of the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Branch in the Ecosystems Division. He has been instrumental in designing, implementing and providing leadership to the operationalization of the concept of Natural Capital through flagship projects like VANTAGE (Valuation and Accounting of Natural Capital for Green Economy) and Proecoserv, culminating in a resolution on Natural Capital passed during UNEA2 in 2016.

Pushpam has served as a member of the Expert Panel of the National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA). He is also Advisory Board member of the Gulbenkia Ocean Initiative (Lisbon). He was closely associated with the 2007 Nobel peace prize winning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) where he served as the Lead Author for the Fourth Assessment of the IPCC (Mitigation). He was co-coordinating lead author of the Responses Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He also co-chaired the Policy and Technical Committee of the Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) Programme led by the World Bank.

Pushpam has a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics and, in the years 1991-2010, he has been at the University of Liverpool and University of Delhi as Associate Professor and Professor in Environmental Economics. He also holds the Position of Honorary Research Scientist at the Earth Institute of Columbia University in New York and is an Extra-Ordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Bioscience, Ecological Economics, Ambio, Ecosystem Services, and Journal of International Development. He has authored or edited more than eight books. He has been elected Member of the Board of International Society for Ecological Economics, Indian Society for Ecological Economics, and European Society for Ecological Economics. He is also on the editorial board of various journals including Ecological Economics.

Nelly Wamaitha, PhD, LLM, LLB

Nelly Wamaitha is Assistant Professor of Theology and International Studies at Boston College. Her areas of research and interest are ethics, human rights, economic justice and international development, law and society, postcolonial theology, and critical theory. 

Prior to her academic career Nelly worked as a lawyer in Nairobi, Kenya, and in London. Before undertaking doctoral studies at Emory University, Nelly studied law at Duke University and the University of Nairobi and theological studies at the University of Oxford.

Her current project is a telling of a decolonial history of the law in Kenya, by focusing on the role that the law and the Constitution played in creating inequalities in economic and political power between Kenya and its colonizers. Her work is an attempt to understand how colonial logics have been transmitted across time and by so doing learn how colonial logics sustain themselves to produce new forms of colonialism today. Hence, she articualtes theologies of history and of law that have the power to resist colonial power structures.

Paul M. Romer, PhD

Paul Romer – the Seidner University Professor and founding director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at the Carroll School of Management – is one of the most influential economists of the 21st century. In four decades as a professional economist, he has addressed a range of abstract and practical questions, typically by re-examining an existing concern from a novel perspective.

In 2018 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. His Nobel lecture elaborates on the implications of ideas for “The Possibility of Progress.” Owing to his interest in not just the abstract process of innovation but also the practical details, in 2001 Romer started an educational technology company, Aplia, which showed how online exercises could reinforce classroom education. He sold the company to Cengage Learning in 2007.

In 1993, he co-authored (with George Akerlof) a paper that used the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to highlight the harm that careless financial deregulation could cause. The paper met with considerable skepticism at the time, but since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, its message has become part of the “accepted wisdom.” The paper is also seen as one of the founding contributions to the area known as Forensic Finance.

After 2007, Romer focused on successful urbanization as a key driver of rapid catch-up growth for poor countries. The importance of this process is particularly clear in China’s rapid growth during the 1990s. On the basis of the successful urban centers of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, he encouraged policy makers to consider the possibility of starting entirely new “Charter Cities.” He became the founding director of New York University’s Marron Institute for Urban Management and subsequently chief economist at the World Bank. His approach to urban design and form is reflected in his exploration of Black Rock City, which comes into existence each year with a population of 70,000 at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.

Recently, Romer has revisited the policy challenges created by the novel characteristics of ideas as economic goods. He has also emphasized the problems created by web business models based on targeted digital advertising, and the threat posed by digital messages of unknown provenance. The Center for the Economics of Ideas that he launched at Boston College offers practical solutions that address the need for “Digital Authenticity,” by helping authors and publishers to certify to any reader the integrity of the files they distribute.

Adetoun Mustapha, PhD, MPH, ISEEF

Adetoun Mustapha is a leading Environmental Epidemiologist in Africa. Her research is focused on air pollution, social determinants of health, plastic pollution, climate change and ethics. Her 30-year career spans industry, academia, and research. She is an adjunct Associate Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Lead City University, Nigeria and an adjunct Researcher at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR). 

She has been the Principal and Co-Principal Investigator in various impactful projects including the Population-Based Interventions towards Reducing the burden of Hypertension in Nigeria (PoBIRH), the Lagos Air Quality Monitoring Program, and the Nigerian Environmental Epidemiology Accelerated Research (NEEAR) Program.

She has been an expert reviewer and member of various international groups such as the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, and the World Health Organization Personal Interventions and Risk Communication on Air Pollution. She is a Fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini, Fellow of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), the inaugural chair of International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Africa chapter and past Councilor for Africa in the ISEE Council. She is a recipient of several national and international awards including the ISEE Rebecca James Baker Memorial Prize.

Christina McRorie, PhD

At Boston College, Christina McRorie is associate professor of moral theology at the Gloria L. and Charles I. Clough School of Theology and Ministry. Her research is interdisciplinary, and draws from the Christian tradition, political economy, and economics to consider questions about moral agency and obligation in markets. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Society of Christian Ethics, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Moral Theology and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought. From 2020 to 2023 she was a Research Fellow in the Collaborative Inquiries in Christian Theological Anthropology project funded through the John Templeton Foundation.

She received her doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2016, and before joining Boston College she taught at Creighton University for seven years. She also has experience leading low-income financial empowerment programming, including two years coordinating volunteer tax preparation sites with the Boston Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Coalition. She is currently at work on a monograph project that uses the theological category of “the world” to examine markets as contexts for moral agency.

Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox, MDiv

The Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox serves as a climate and energy policy consultant and is the President Emeritus of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), where he led the EEN team for fifteen (15) years.

He co-authored Caring for Creation: The Evangelical Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment with nationally known meteorologist Paul Douglas. He also contributed to: Sacred Acts: How Churches Are Working Together to Protect Earth’s Climate; Health of People, Health of Planet, Our Responsibility; and Loving the Least of These. He has testified before Congress, spoken at the White House, and presented at the Vatican and the Council for Foreign Relations. He has appeared on CNN, NPR, PRI, MSNBC, BBC, and numerous radio programs, both Christian and secular.

Rev. Hescox and EEN have been widely recognized for their advocacy for the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS), Land Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), Growing Climate Solutions Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and Methane Leakage Reduction Standards, among others.

He is a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, a past member of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Board of Directors, a past member of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Citizen Advisory Council, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.

Before joining EEN, he pastored a local church for 18 years, and before the call to ordained ministry served the coal and utility industry as Director, Fuel Systems for Allis Mineral Systems (York, PA).