William Solecki, Ph.D

William Solecki is co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, which provides climate research to the Mayor’s office and city agencies, and is a lead author on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, Urban Impacts chapter. Dr. Solecki is co-director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, as well as director of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. He is the outgoing director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, and professor in the Geography Department at Hunter College, CUNY.

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Eric Sanderson, Ph.D

Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and is director of The Welikia Project (formerly “Mannahatta”), an effort to reconstruct the original ecology of the entire area of New York City at the time of European discovery. In 2009 he published a book and interactive website, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” illustrated by Markley Boyer, and he curated an exhibition based on the Mannahatta Project on display at the Museum of the City of New York.

Dr. Sanderson received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1998; At WCS, he established the “Landscape Ecology and Geographic Analysis” program to bring landscape thinking and geographic analysis tools into conservation practice. In 2002 Dr. Sanderson and colleagues created the Human Footprint map, the first look at human influence globally at less than 1 square mile resolution. He is an expert on species conservation planning and has contributed to efforts to save lions, jaguars, bison and gazelle, among other species; and landscape planning conservation efforts in Argentina, Tanzania, Mongolia, and in the US, at Yellowstone and in the Adirondacks.

In 2013, Dr. Sanderson published his second book, Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars and Suburbs, and launched Mannahatta 2409, an interactive platform that lets you design Manhattan for the future.

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Projjal Dutta, A.I.A, LEED AP

Projjal Dutta is the Director of Sustainability Initiatives at the MTA, where his responsibilities include helping prepare the agency for the effects of a changing climate.

Before joining the MTA, Mr. Dutta worked as sustainable architecture consultant for New York City Transit, MTA Capital Construction Company, Hugh L. Carey Battery Park City Authority, and New Jersey Transit; as well as for several private and institutional entities. He served as the Sustainable Strategies Manager for STV, a New York-based architectural engineering firm, between 2005 and 2007. Before STV, he worked for Fox & Fowle Architects and for Cesar Pelli & Associates in New Haven.  Prior to coming to the United States, he worked for Stein Doshi Bhalla, one of India’s premier architectural practices and ran his own office in New Delhi.

He holds a Masters of Science in Architectural Studies and Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelors in Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi.