Alan Waxman has worked on the design of public parks and campuses in New York City, Hangzhou, Xi’An, and Chengdu with NYC Parks, QRP design, Sorkin Studio, and SWA. His landscape renderings have appeared in the Architects Newspaper, ASLA the Dirt, Landscape Architecture Magazine, New York Magazine. AWED, Alan Waxman Ecosocial Design, (awecosocial.com) creates ecosocial design for health equity and cultural resiliency in California, the Pacific Northwest, NYC, and Japan. The “Urban Rhythms” studios, conducted with the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Center for Court Innovation, and Storefront for Art and Architecture, assess urban patterns by way of participatory engagement. Based primarily in Brownsville Brooklyn, NYC, they create a behavior blockchain system for improved health outcomes in high risk groups. This has been written about in “Mapping Emotion to Improve Neighborhood Health” in New York Academy of Medicine, and “Behavior Blockchain For Healthy Cities” in the Journal of Urban Design and Public Health.
Chethan Sarabu lives and works at the anastomosis of pediatrics, landscape architecture, and clinical informatics. The driving force connecting these interests is the pursuit of improving children’s lives. After training in landscape architecture at Cornell University he went through medical training with the principles of Olmsted in mind: long-term, ecological, systems-based design. He currently works as a pediatrician at Stanford and also is the director of clinical informatics and head of product at an A.I. health tech startup, doc.ai. He is involved in interventions connecting landscape to the healthcare system via electronic health record systems such as through park prescription programs. He is also an active child health advocate working towards improved equity across health and social sectors.
JENNY SETA
Seta is a Mental Health Peer Advocate, Speaker and Writer who seeks to impact compassionate change in the mental healthcare system. With lived experience in mental health challenges, she speaks deeply to the way the current model of psychiatric hospitals and care can isolate and exacerbate cycles of trauma. She has proposed alternatives, particularly the transformation of hospitals into much more mindful and hospitable environments that incorporate place-based and collective healing. Based in San Francisco, she is an active volunteer for the Mental Health Association of San Francisco’s (MHASF) speakers bureau, educating the public, healthcare providers and patients with the aim to reduce stigma on mental health challenges.
LAURIANE SUYIN CHALMIN-PUI MS PhD
(Twitter: @LaurianeSuyin)
Lauriane's doctoral research is on the relationship between people and their gardens, focusing on evaluating the impact of vegetated front gardens on residents’ health, well-being, and stress. Lauriane is based at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. She has also recently been a Visiting PhD Scholar at the Center for Design and Health at the School of Architecture, University of Virginia. Lauriane has a BA (Hons) in Geography from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
My research focuses on Native American ethnographic and contemporary arts, not only in an object-based sense, but strives to include concepts of authority, use and interpretation, social identity and representation. As a curator I believe in encouraging active participation of artists to articulate their tribal histories and knowledge portrayed in visual culture and inviting audiences to meet cultural specialists who can express their perspectives and experiences. Generally speaking I am interested in collaborative research projects that strengthen relations between tribal communities, Native American art historians, and museums.
NYSHIA BROOKS
Nyshia Brooks is a community health organizer
and founder of the Black Butterfly Societe, a non-profit breaking ground and barriers in cultivating empowerment, education, and self-care in the garden of personal growth. She is currently providing community organizing coordination, program development, and operations management for The NKB Lab, LLC, Principal Consultant., experimenting with creativity and creating solutions by connecting assets and talents within communities. She is consulting for the Minority Health & Wellness Project, Board Coordinator of Community Services & Programming, dedicated to the overall health and wellness of communities by centralizing community partners and reconnecting them to local residents they are committed to serving. She provides consulting for Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, Chapter Coordinator - Mansfield, Ohio, advocating for survivors of crime and the communities they live in, bringing awareness to the system barriers that prevent the services and resources needed to allow victims of crime to heal. Nyshia is developing a legacy to change her life and the lives of others for the better...especially her children.
RUKIYEH Z ABDUL-MUTAKALLIM
Abdul Mutakallim is the Survivor's Advocate Coordinator for Crime Survivors For Safety and Justice, Cincinnati Chapter and is the founder of The Muskateer Association, a nonprofit based in prevention of violence. She and her team are currently working on a place based project to promote healing by honoring those wrongfully slayed in our communities and thus, igniting a beacon of hope and goodwill across our city and nation. The proposal is to create stewarded flower pots promoting healing to stand forth as a reminder, bring light and beauty, and unify and
honor.
Simran Singh, an architect and an urbanist, is passionate about the intersection of contemporary architectural design with urbanism that mirrors her academic background from the Architectural Association, London. She strives to achieve balance between the two-scales by reconstituting place-making as an agenda of social, economic, and political concerns. Inclined towards domesticity and its role in shaping our communities, Simran presented her research on alternative housing typologies for sustainable city densification at the Healthy City Design International Congress 2019, London. Her design critique on mass housing projects as a consequence of biopolitics was published on the digital platform, CARTHA Magazine.
Tashiana aspires to improve mental health outcomes and overall well-being by providing holistic educational opportunities and horticultural therapy interventions that nurture ecologically responsible stewards with renewed relationships to the land and each other. Tashiana co-founded Community Cooperative farms, after graduating with her BA in a self designed major of Creative Writing for Social Change and went on to pursue teaching and researching the impacts of yoga and mindfulness in marginalized public schools, with the Sonima Foundation and Stanford University. Currently working as a clinical social worker in Oakland, CA with students, patients with co-morbid mental health and chronic disease diagnoses and transitional aged youth. She is especially interested in the impacts of horticultural therapy on communities and individuals impacted by complex traumas that result in complex PTSD symptomology. Tashiana seeks to incorporate land-based therapeutic interventions to increase positive feelings, decrease negative symptoms, instill coping skills, nurture caring for others, center exertion of self agency and to foster meaningful community.
