Mark Pisano is a Professor of the Practice of Public Administration at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. He currently serves on the Board of the National Academy of Public Administration and Co-Chairs the Standing Panel on Intergovernmental Relations. He is Co-chair of the Infrastructure Working Group of California Forward. He is Chairman of the Infrastructure Funding Alliance, a national non-profit developing an alternative funding paradigm for funding infrastructure and public goods. For 31 years, he served as executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the nation’s largest regional planning agency. Before joining SCAG, Mark Pisano served as director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Quality Planning Division. He has also co-founded and held positions at various not-for-profit and governmental associations, such as the California Center for Research and Development, California Federation for Energy and the Environment, California Hazardous Waste Management Authority, LINC Housing, and California Leadership. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Georgetown University.

Tapio Schneider is the Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech and a Senior Research Scientist at JPL. His research focuses on how the climate of Earth and other planets comes about and may change, for example, by changes in atmospheric circulation or cloud cover. To improve climate predictions, he and his colleagues at CliMA are currently developing next-generation climate models that fuse observations with process models of the Earth system.