Steering Committe
Karen Russell
Born in Baltimore, Karen graduated from Frostburg State University (B.A., Art) and the University of Baltimore (M.S., Business). After a career in public relations, marketing and project management, she started a pottery business, making and selling functional stoneware. Since 2013, she has been involved in environmental education and addressing climate change/biodiversity loss at the local level.
She taught classes on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed to elementary and middle school students as a volunteer for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. She received Maryland Master Naturalist certification and completed Maryland Climate Leadership Academy coursework, sponsored by the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Association of Climate Change Officers.
She formed the Climate Change Working Group of Frederick County in 2016. Her interest in protecting the natural world for future generations led to writing Wildlife Corridors in Frederick County: Conserving Nature in Maryland’s Appalachian Heart. She is responsible for the biodiversity recommendation in the August 2021 Frederick City/County Climate Emergency Mobilization Work Group report titled “Climate Response and Resilience,” and serves on the Board of the Catoctin Land Trust.
Joanne Horn
Joanne Horn earned a B.S. in Ecology and a Ph.D. in Microbiology/Molecular Biology at the Univ. California, Berkeley. She has held a number of positions spanning industry, government and academia that have centered on environmental issues and global health security. Dr. Horn has explored novel bacterial metabolic pathways for mitigating heavy metal and organic contaminants, analyzed the microbial effects on long term geologic storage of nuclear waste, and studied detection, survival and dispersion of pathogens under varying environmental conditions. Joanne has managed small lab-scale to large international projects involving a range of stakeholders, including collaborations with academia, industry, government agencies, NGOs, and foreign entities. Her passion is to bringing practical solutions to complex multi-factorial problems.
Ed Grayzeck
Ed has a BS from Saint Mary University of Minnesota (Physics) and MS and Ph. D from the University of Maryland (Technical Management). He is retired from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), where he was director of the NASA Space Science Data Center Archive. He is now a consultant to NASA through a contract with GSFC regarding distributed systems. Ed is interested in all things related to energy.