Nicole Foti's (she/her) research analyzes the emergent movement to apply open-source principles to pharmaceutical research and examines potential emancipatory practices in the production of biomedical knowledge in a community-based medicine initiative. Her research illuminates alternative ways to organize scientific knowledge production and explores the potential for these projects to address the injustices of the political economy of health and illness.

The study draws on over 300 hours of ethnographic observations with the Open Insulin Project and offers a novel contribution to scholarship on the unique challenges facing expert-derived resources such as biomedical knowledge and the role of governance and power sharing in community-based medicine. Nicole has also published a policy brief that describes factors driving the insulin crisis in the U.S. – where many diabetics struggle to afford insulin.

Prior to graduate school, Nicole was at a HIV/AIDS nonprofit organization and worked closely with people living with HIV to access medication. This direct-service work informs much of her research program and desire to bridge research with activism. Nicole has bachelor's degrees in Biology from Oregon State University and in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Oregon.

As a Chancellor’s Fellow, Melanie Brazzell studies gender, critical criminology, and social movements. Melanie’s dissertation focuses on transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing, particularly for gender-based violence. Drawing on their involvement in the feminist anti-violence movement for over fifteen years in both the U.S. and Germany, Melanie’s participatory research and community engagement are housed within the “What Really Makes Us Safe?” Project.

Melanie is currently exploring research as a movement building tool through collaborations with the Momentum Community, the Just Beginnings Collaborative, and the Realizing Democracy Project. Together with movement partners like Sunrise and Color Of Change, Melanie recently authored the Building Structure Shapes report. To continue this work, Melanie joined the SNF Agora Institute’s P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University as a pre-doctoral fellow this academic year (2021-2022).

Melanie is also passionate about pedagogy, having worked for eight years in Berlin as a teacher at a co-operative, democratic high school for non-traditional adult students, which won the Bosch Foundation’s second place prize for best school in Germany in 2016. Melanie received a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master’s from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

Steve Dubb has been written about and participated in cooperative education and development for the past three decades. Steve is currently senior editor at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), where he directs NPQ’s economic justice program. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005), coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads (MSU Press, 2012, and editor of Conversations on Community Wealth Building (Democracy Collaborative 2016).

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press 2009), eplores the affective stimuli and blockages to political activism while documenting a disappearing queer history, all with an eye toward opening imaginative possibilities for the present. Involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years, and later in Queer to the Left, she also was a founding member of the research/art/activist collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed. For more information, click here.

Minsun Ji (Ph.D.) is a labor-community organizer, activist scholar, and popular educator. Currently, Minsun is the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC), which promotes employee ownership through coop conversion, coop incubation, research, and policy.

Minsun was the graduate program director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver where she created graduate program tracks in the social economy and community/labor organizing. Minsun organized immigrant janitors, immigrant day laborers and domestic workers and she was the founder and executive director of Denver’s first worker center, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (Humanitarian Center for Workers).

Carole has worked for decades to help protect women’s reproductive health from continuing right-wing attacks. Her influential books include Doctors of Conscience and Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. She is currently affiliated with the Bixby Center in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, UCSF.