Learning to Listen: Conversations for Change

Rupa Basu, Ph.D., MPH, is currently the Chief of the Air and Climate Epidemiology Section at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) of the California Environmental Protection Agency. She has published extensively on research focusing on examining temperature and air pollution on health outcomes, including mortality, morbidity, and adverse birth outcomes while identifying vulnerable subgroups. 

Prior to joining OEHHA, she worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency, after obtaining her PhD degree in epidemiology from The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and her MPH degree from the UCLA School of Public Health.  She collaborates with external agencies such as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Kaiser Division of Research.

She has served as a referee for many health journals and has been on several scientific advisory panels for reviewing grant proposals and reports for federal and state governmental agencies. She serves on several statewide and national climate change committees and has been an invited guest speaker on many occasions from academic settings including teaching a course on climate change and public health at UC Berkeley to governmental leaders, such as former Governor Schwarzenegger. She was featured in the Emmy award-winning climate change documentary, Years of Living Dangerously, “Mercury Rising” episode with Matt Damon. Dr. Basu’s work is widely cited and has received a lot of media attention, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, LA Times, SF Chronicle, National Public Radio, and BBC World News. 

Susan Linn, Ed.D,  a psychologist, an author, and an award-winning ventriloquist, is a world-renowned expert on creative play, and the impact of tech and commercial marketing on children.

Dr. Linn’s books have been praised in publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and The New York Times, which called her most recent book Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business and the Lives of Children, “Engrossing and Insightful.”

A passionate advocate for children, Dr. Linn was the Founding Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay) from 2000-2015. She has lectured on the importance of creative play, the impact of tech, media, and marketing on children, and on puppetry as a therapeutic tool, throughout North America, and in South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia.

Dr. Linn is internationally known for her use of puppets as therapeutic tools for children. She pioneered this work at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Children’s AIDS Program, where she used puppets to help children cope with illness, hospitalization, death, loss, and other life challenges. Dr. Linn and her puppets appeared in several episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She has written and appeared in a number of video programs designed to help children cope with issues ranging from mental illness to death and loss and, most recently, stresses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This Secret Should Be Told, a syndicated TV program for children about sexual abuse, won a coveted Action for Children’s Television Award and earned Dr. Linn a New England Emmy. 

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen, MPH, is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux and Yaqui Tribes and a current student at Harvard Medical School. He is the first documented Indigenous person on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in healthcare. Prior to medical school, he clerked for the Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. House of Representatives, completed a Master of Public Health on a Fulbright Scholarship, and served as Co-Chair of the UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.

His writing and work focus on Indigenous global health, recruitment of students who are under-represented in medicine, climate health justice, and health equity. He serves as a research project Advisory Board Member at Ariadne Labs, a member of the City of Boston’s COVID-19 Health Inequities Task Force, and a member of the White House Health Inequities Roundtable Leaders Group.

He has written for Teen Vogue, Forbes Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Harvard Health Publishing. Victor has clerked for the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently a member of Boston’s COVID-19 Health Inequities Task Force, and cochair of the UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.