Grace Bulltail, Ph.D.
Crow
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Dr. Bulltail is originally from Montana and is a member of the Crow Tribe and a descendant of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Tribes. She is an assistant professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed her Ph.D. in Biological & Environmental Engineering at Cornell University.
Dr. Bulltail’s research lab group focuses on natural and water resource management, land use, and resource sovereignty in Indigenous communities. Dr. Bulltail is a member of the American Indian Science & Engineering Society board of directors and a professional engineer licensed in California. She also serves on the U.S. Departments of Interior and Justice Not Invisible Act Commission, which is charged with addressing the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Joslynn Lee, Ph.D.
Pueblo Laguna
Assistant Professor
Fort Lewis College
Joslynn Lee, Ph.D. is of the Diné (Navajo Nation), K’awaika (enrolled: Pueblo of Laguna), and Haak’u (Pueblo of Acoma) people. From her intertribal upbringing, Dr. Lee applies her Indigenous values and perspectives to chemistry, genomics, data science, and academia. She is currently an Assistant Professor of biochemistry at Fort Lewis College (FLC) in Durango, CO.
She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from Fort Lewis College and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northeastern University. Joslynn’s research lab uses sequencing technologies to identify and study acidophiles in acid mine drainage sites in the San Juan Watershed as these acidophiles perform unique metals chemistry.
She has worked to increase opportunities for historically excluded and under-represented minorities in STEM by developing culturally relevant curricula in data science and chemistry. Dr. Lee was selected as a 2023 Kavli Frontiers in Science Fellow and is the advisor for the FLC SACNAS Chapter.
Felipe Zapata, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of California, Los Angeles
Originally from Colombia, Felipe Zapata is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA where he teaches botany and evolutionary biology. He also leads a research group in which students and postdoctoral researchers combine field biology, genomics, and computational biology to study ecology, evolution, and biodiversity conservation in California and Tropical South America. Before UCLA, Dr. Zapata was an Assistant Professor at SFSU and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley as well as Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri - St. Louis and his B.Sc. from the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia.
As a tropical biologist, Dr. Zapata has always been fascinated with the exuberant biodiversity of the tropics and now of California. He has conducted fieldwork in tropical rainforests, savannas, deserts, and the Andes. Recently, he served as a biodiversity consultant for the Disney Oscar-winning movie “Encanto.”