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Organized by University Albert Einstein and Lifelong Education

About:

Do you love the feeling of community? Do you love engaging in worthwhile community endeavors?

Do you dream of contributing to the well-being of our world?

Then, we invite you to come along and hear from five who have passionately engaged in beneficial local and global community endeavors. These community engagers collectively contributed to the well-being of our planet, and sentient Life including their Life and the lives of their families, friends, neighbors, local community and communities around the globe.

They represent various aspects of Life in the arts, sciences, fields of education, humanities and technologies.

Experience the bubbles of inspiration arising within as you contemplate the possibilities of expressing your unique talents and interests and playing your roles in Life’s unfolding, beneficial community engagement!

Dates:

April 18 and 20, 2023

3 hours in the evening from:

5 pm to 8:15 (Mexico Central Time).
6 pm to 9:15 pm (CST).
4 pm to 7:15 pm (Pacific time).

Day 1: April 18, 2023

1. Dr. Patricia Wilson / The Heart of Community Engagement.

2. Mario Ferriz / Moving Forward with Technology.

3. Sophia Zegarra / Life’s Artful Expressions.

Day 2: April 20, 2023

1. Jazmin Alcantara/ Foundations for Science and Humanity in Early Education.

2. Dr. Charles Goldman / Restoration of Healthy Waterways - science and community engagement.

3. Forum: “As We See It”.

Costs:

General public: $40 USD

Global UAE Students $20 USD

Speakers:

Dr. Charles R. Goldman

Distinguished Professor of Limnology Emeritus

Dept. of Environmental Science & Policy

University of California Davis

Topic: Restoration of Healthy Waterways - science and community engagement.

Charles R. Goldman, Distinguished Professor of Limnology Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, was with the University of California, Davis from 1958-2010. He developed the first courses in limnology and oceanography at UC Davis, served as Chair of the Division of Environmental Studies from 1988-1992, and was founding Director of the Institute of Ecology, serving from 1966-1969 and again in 1990-1992. He has supervised 101 graduate students and 34 postdoctoral researchers during the five decades at UC Davis.

Prior to his 52-year tenure at UC Davis, he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Limnology-Fisheries from the University of Michigan.

Professor Goldman’s Distinguished Contributions:

His single most important and sustained contribution is the five decades of research on Lake Tahoe. Professor Goldman was Director of the Lake Tahoe and Castle Lake Research Groups and has pursued long-term ecological research simultaneously at Lake Tahoe and Castle Lake, California, since 1958. He successfully combined effective research and social action with his pioneering studies of lake eutrophication. These were applied to engineering solutions, social needs, and legal decisions. This work has recently included the development of artificial wetlands and research on alternatives to road salt for de-icing highways as well as the impact of Climate Change on Inland Water. The relationship of science to political change has been of particular importance to the Lake Tahoe basin. During the summer of 1997, Dr. Goldman hosted President Clinton and Vice President Gore aboard the UC Davis research vessel John Le Conte during the Lake Tahoe Presidential Forum. Similar studies have extended Dr. Goldman's research-social action efforts to analysis of lakes like Baikal in Russia and hydroelectric projects throughout the world tropics where he served as president of research in the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. While pursuing basic research on lake dynamics, he has also translated the findings directly to state, national and international policy decisions, contributing decisively to the conservation and judicious use of aquatic resources from the Antarctic to the lakes and wetlands of South and Central America, New Guinea, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Dr. Goldman has published four books and over 550 scientific articles, and four environmental documentary films that are in worldwide distribution.
He served on many national and international committees and is frequently sought for consultation and research missions to foreign countries on major environmental problems.
In 1990, he was a member of a UNESCO team to qualify Lake Baikal in Russian Siberia as an International Heritage Lake.
He served as Senior Scientist for the National Geographic Baikal project in 2003.
Retired since 2010, he continues to travel, write and give podcasts on his expertise in restoring health to the world’s waterways. He also writes children’s environmental books available on Amazon.

Dr. Patricia A. Wilson

Professor Emerita

School of Architecture

University of Texas at Austin

Topic: The Heart of Community Engagement.

After undergraduate studies at Stanford in the late ‘60s, Patricia Wilson pursued graduate studies in planning at Cornell (MRP 1971, Ph.D. 1975), including a paradigm-changing year of dissertation research in Chile and Peru on regional political economy. After teaching at Cornell for a year, she worked in economic development planning with the City of San Francisco followed by the Economic Development Administration in Washington DC, where her first child was born.

Dr. Wilson joined the UTSOA planning faculty in 1979, teaching economic development planning and expanding the new Dual Degree Program in Planning and Latin American Studies. During the ‘80s and ‘90s she conducted research on urban sub-employment in the US, maquiladoras in Mexico, and Latino neighborhood issues in Austin, while doing international development consulting and a Fulbright research year in Lima. She became the first female and North American to serve as president of the Sociedad Interamericana de Planificación, the professional society of Latin American planners.

After 2000, her research, influenced by the relational awareness of systems thinking, turned to participatory practices and community-based change processes with cases across the Global South. Courses included action research, participatory methods, deep democracy, and most recently, the Art of Community Engagement. She also led a seven-year practicum in community engagement in urban and peri-urban Mexico.

Dr. Wilson is the author or co-author of seven books and numerous journal articles. Her latest book, The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe (Routledge, 2019) won the 2020 Hamilton Book Award for best textbook. Dr. Wilson currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change and is an adviser to the World Health Organization on whole person/whole systems community engagement protocols.

Mario Ferriz

Topic: Moving Forward with Technology

Mario Ferriz was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, and has worked in Software Engineering for 35 years. He specializes in embedded software engineering and has created software for government and private institutions. Mario has a degree in Electronic Systems Engineering. He has been certified as an ethical hacker (CEH) and a Scrum Master. He has lived in Austin, Texas, for the past 16 years, working for Trend Micro, a worldwide cybersecurity firm, designing and building intrusion prevention systems.

Mario also holds a Master's in Peace Education from University Albert Einstein in Mexico. He believes a better world can resolve differences with more education and collaboration, so he co-founded Lifelong Education, a nonprofit educational organization with this purpose in mind.

He enjoys spending time with his family, volunteering, and doing other activities such as meditation, walking, genealogy, football, and chess.

Sophia Zegarra

Topic: Life’s Artful Expressions

Sophia Zegarra is a young professional in the geospatial technology industry in the Austin, Texas metro area. She works for the City of Round Rock, a rapidly growing suburb north of Austin. She intertwines geography, technology and data to support Round Rock’s utility infrastructure and services—water, storm water, reuse water, and environmental services—efficiently and adequately for residents.

Sophia graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor's degree in geography in 2020, and has worked for the City of Round Rock for two years. She loves the interdisciplinary nature of her degree and her career because we can use a spatial perspective – asking how location influences our life – within any field or industry, and because we can leverage the technological revolution to answer these important questions with exponential scale, information, and intelligence. Sophia has had the privilege to work with engineers, scientists, government and tech professionals and designers in her professional and academic career.

Outside of her career, Sophia loves cooking, reading, writing, dancing, singing, and learning languages. Her biggest passions are understanding cultures, practicing creativity, and self-understanding. She feels extremely privileged to present on the role of human creativity for community engagement and human connection in her amazing hometown for the Universidad Albert Einstein in Mexico.

Jazmin Alcantara

Topic: Foundations for Science and Humanity in Early Education

Jazmin Alcantara was born and raised in Mexico City. She studied Marketing at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. In 2006, she came to the United States and become a teacher in 2009. Since then, Jazmin has been a bilingual educator. She works with kinder through 3rd grade students helping them learn in their native language and bridging their first language knowledge with their second language, English. Jazmin also works with the students’ families building community and a sense of belonging. She advocates for equity and fairness within the school setting.

Jazmin is the President of Lifelong Education, a 501c3 non-profit educational organization with headquarters in Austin, Texas, USA, recognized by the State of Texas and the USA. Its focus is on integral, ethical human improvement with a mission to expand consciousness and consolidate a culture of peace in the world.