Board of Directors

Aaron S. Allen is Director of the Environment and Sustainability Program and Associate Professor of Music at UNC Greensboro, where he also served as the institution’s first Academic Sustainability Coordinator. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he earned his PhD from Harvard in 2006 with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Italian reception of Beethoven. He earned his BA in music and BS in environmental studies from Tulane University. Aaron’s research interests include campus sustainability, Beethoven reception, and ecomusicology. His co-edited collection (with Kevin Dawe), Current Directions in Ecomusicology (Routledge 2016), was awarded the 2018 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Aaron’s banking career includes prior positions at Houlihan Lokey and Citi. He also served as CFO at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a 130-year-old community-based social services organization located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Aaron’s government experience includes serving as Special Counsel at the White House during the Clinton administration, and as the Director of the Office of Credit and Investment at USAID, where he ran global credit programs supporting small and medium businesses as part of the U.S. government’s development assistance effort. Aaron holds an MBA from Columbia University and a JD from Georgetown University. He was born and raised in New York City, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters.

Céline Delacroix is a part-time Professor in Health Sciences in the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa. Her research specialties include climate change, environmental communication, and population health.

She’s also a Senior Fellow at the Population Institute (PI), and Director of the PI’s FP/Earth, where she manages research, communication, and outreach. FP/Earth analyzes the linkages between family planning, population size, and environmental sustainability, how they are perceived, and how they could be harnessed to strengthen reproductive rights and improve environmental sustainability.

Céline has been the Executive Director of several human rights and environmental NGOs, including the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and Ethiopia-aid Canada.

Céline has a PhD in Population Health from University of Ottawa, an MS in Environmental Management from the Free University of Brussels, and an LLB (Law) from Cardiff University.

Robert Engelman is an American author and former journalist who writes about the environment and population. He served as vice president of the Worldwatch Institute from 2007 to 2011 and as its president from 2011 until 2014. His book Intending Eden: Parenting, Population, and the Planet, an update of an earlier work, will be published in the spring of 2026.

Engelman began his career as a newspaper reporter, working for the Associated Press out of Mexico City in 1977. He subsequently worked for the Kansas City Times in Kansas City and Washington, D.C., and then for the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News as its Washington correspondent. He later joined the national reporting staff of Scripps Howard News Service, eventually serving as its science, health, and environment correspondent.

In 1992, Engelman left journalism and founded a research program on population and the environment at Population Action International (PAI). He later became vice president for research at PAI. In 1997, he was among the founders of the Center for a New American Dream and served until 2007 as chair of its board of directors. While at PAI, Engelman and colleagues published reports on the linkages of population dynamics and environmental change, one of which led to a paper published in the journal Nature. In 2000 and again in 2002 and 2003, Engelman served on the faculty of Yale University as a visiting lecturer on population and the environment. Since 2018 he has served as a Senior Fellow with the Population Institute, writing on demographic and environmental change and contributing to projects for the organization.

Engelman received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Chicago and his Master of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which in 1976 awarded him a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.

In his role at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Bruce Fallick leads the microeconomics group, which conducts research in various fields of microeconomics, including labor, education, public, and urban economics; oversees the regional analysis and outreach group; and provides advice on monetary policy. Dr. Fallick’s own work has focused on research related to labor and macroeconomics. His current research concentrates on job loss, unemployment, worker mobility, and wage rigidity.​​​

Prior to joining the Cleveland Reserve Bank in 2014, Dr. Fallick served as a Senior Economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He joined the Federal Reserve Board in 1993. Dr. Fallick also served as a Visiting Professor of Economics at Oberlin College and as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Dr. Fallick holds a BA in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Bryce is originally from Iowa and grew up in Colorado. After graduating from Colorado College in 1998, Bryce became a public high school science teacher and football coach in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America in one of the poorest corners of the United States.

Bryce then completed the Coro Public Policy Fellows program in St. Louis, an intensive one-year fellowship in public policy leadership where you work in leadership roles in all sectors and then a Master’s of Science in public policy management from Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2004, Bryce moved back to Colorado, and took over the role as the Executive Director of a private foundation where he oversaw the transition from supporting local scholarships and outreach to science teachers in high school science education.  After this, Bryce took on the role of Executive Director of a multi-sector collaborative effort to reduce homelessness in Fort Collins, Colorado.

In 2013, Bryce and his family made an intentional move to Falmouth, Maine.  Bryce initially served as the Development Director of Maine Audubon and taught a graduate course in nonprofit and public management at the Muskie School, the University of Maine’s public policy school.  In 2018, Bryce and his wife started a business called Maine Food for Thought, an educational food tour based on locally and sustainably-sourced food, which had a great run until the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to run the business.

Bryce started at North Yarmouth Academy, in Yarmouth, Maine in 2020 as the biology and environmental science teacher.  Bryce is also a graduate and serves on the Board of Directors of the Maine Master Naturalist Program.

Mark J. Hathaway is Director of Family Planning Services at Unity Health Care, Inc. and Senior Technical Advisor for Reproductive Health at Jhpiego, an international NGO focusing on international maternal child health. A board-certified Ob/Gyn, Mark served on the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) board and the IOM Standing Committee on Family Planning. He is currently on the Clinician Leadership Council of Upstream USA and on the board of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP).

He holds appointments at Georgetown University and George Washington University Schools of Medicine. Mark’s MPH in Sexual Reproductive Health is from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, his MD is from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, and his BA in Biology is from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Jeff provided strategic leadership and vision for Population Reference Bureau (PRB) as president and CEO. He retired from that position in 2024, after 10 years, and after a 35-year career in international development.

Prior to PRB, Jeff was the senior vice president for international programs at the Catholic Medical Mission Board, where he provided oversight of all international programs in HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, neglected and tropical diseases, and gender.

His demographic career began at the Population Resource Center and continued at the Futures Group/Constella Futures. At Futures, he first served as an analyst and program manager in population, family planning/reproductive health, and HIV/AIDS, before becoming vice president of program development and COO.

He served for nearly a decade as the co-chair of the USAID Interagency Gender Working Group.

Jeff received his MPA from Princeton University and his BA in economics from Davidson College.

Dr. Gladys is the Founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a Ugandan NGO that promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas, and other wildlife to coexist by improving their health and livelihoods in and around Africa’s protected areas.

Dr. Gladys has won innumerable awards for her work, including a United Nations Environment Programme’s Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation (2021), and a Uganda Veterinary Association World Veterinary Day Award (2020). She was profiled in the BBC documentary, Gladys the African Vet; and has featured in documentaries on National Geographic, Animal Planet, MNet, and Uganda Television.

Dr. Gladys trained as a veterinarian at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College. Between 1996 and 2000, she set up the first veterinary unit at the Uganda Wildlife Authority. From 2000 to 2003, she completed a zoological medicine residency and masters in specialized veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Zoological Park.

Seema Mohapatra, a leading expert in health law and bioethics, is M.D. Anderson Professor in Health Law at SMU Dedman School of Law (Dallas, TX). She teaches Torts, Critical Race Theory, and Race, Health, and Justice.

Prior to joining SMU, Mohapatra was tenured at Indiana University law school, twice earning the Dean’s Fellow title and award for outstanding scholarship. Upon graduating law school, she practiced transactional health law and compliance at Sidley & Austin and Foley & Lardner.

Mohapatra researches health care equity, the intersection of biosciences and the law, assisted reproduction and surrogacy, reproductive justice, and public health law. Her research during the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on how public health laws and policies impact marginalized populations, particularly people of color. She is an international authority on assisted reproduction and surrogacy.

She has published in a range of top law reviews, including Emory Law Journal, University of Colorado Law Review, Harvard Law and Policy Review, and Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, as well as peer reviewed journals, such as Hastings Center Report. Her co-edited books include Feminist Judgments: Health Law Rewritten (2022, Cambridge University Press), and Reproductive Technologies and the Law.

Mohapatra earned a J.D. degree from Northwestern University School of Law and has a master’s degree in Public Health with a concentration in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Bob grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan. He then went to Michigan State for eight years of undergraduate work where he received two Bachelor of Arts degrees: one majoring in humanities, and the other in religion. In 1967, he moved to Detroit to teach and where he has lived until today.

His subsequent degrees are in education; Master’s and EdD, from Wayne State University where he majored in General Secondary Education and Social Studies Education. His doctoral thesis was on teenage unwed mothers.

Dr. Pettapiece taught in Detroit Public Schools for 29 years (1967-1996) and part time in the College of Education for 15 years before becoming full time at Wayne State in 1996. His public school teaching experiences include social studies at the high school level, math in the middle and high school, and computing to children from kindergarten through adult.

At Wayne State he taught elementary social studies education methods courses, social studies master’s classes, and computer applications in teaching. In addition to his teaching, he was also the coordinator for both middle level education and social studies education.

Bob joined ZPG (the original Population Connection) somewhere in the 1970s and used its teaching materials extensively as they became available. In the past, he served on the board of directors for 9 years, and is currently on his second term, serving as the treasurer.

Professor Dara E. Purvis is a scholar of family law, sexual orientation and gender identity, feminist legal theory, and masculinities. She’s taught at Temple University Beasley School of Law since the fall of 2024; her classes have included Family Law; Contracts; Sexuality and the Law; and Children and the Law.

Professor Purvis’s recent work focuses on the constitutional rights of transgender children, and she’s written extensively on gender, masculinities, same sex marriages, and other issues. Her scholarship has featured in the California Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, and Cambridge University Press. She’s also written for The New York Times.

Before she came to Temple, Professor Purvis was a professor at Penn State Law, where she also served as Associate Dean for Research. Previous to Penn, she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. A former editor-in-chief of Yale Law Journal, she clerked for The Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and The Hon. Raymond C. Fisher, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Purvis earned her law degree from Yale Law School, where she served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She has an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University, where she did a dissertation on “The American Same-Sex Marriage Debate: Perspectives from the Marital Legal History of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.”  She earned her BA summa cum laude, from the University of Southern California, where she served as Salutatorian. She’s received many honors and awards throughout her educational and professional career.

Heather L. Smith is a Foreign Service Officer specializing in Health, Population, and Nutrition programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Before joining USAID, Heather served as Deputy Country Coordinator (Kenya) and acting PEPFAR* Country Coordinator/Deputy Country Coordinator (Uganda) at the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Uganda. In both roles, Heather provided HIV/AIDS program planning, coordination, and implementation for ~$500-$400m annual country budgets. She also worked as a grants officer at the U.S. Embassy in Windhoek, Namibia, and as a consultant/grants writer for the Catholic Relief Services in Guinea and West Africa. Prior to her work overseas, Heather worked in public policy on reproductive health, environmental, and state and local government finance issues. She was Director of National Advocacy Programs and Legislative Affairs Manager at Population Connection.

Heather holds a Doctor of Management (DMgt), MBA, and MS in Procurement and Contract Management (supply chain management) from the University of Maryland (UMD) University College. She also holds a BA in political science at University of California, Berkeley.

* U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS Relief

Eleanor has two decades of experience working in sexual and reproductive health and nonprofit leadership, and has spent most of her career at direct service health organizations, including Planned Parenthood of Illinois, the Charles River Community Health Center, Camino Seguro (Safe Passage), and WINGS, where she’s been for nearly eight years. She has worked in youth programming, patient counseling, and rights-based health care. Eleanor has lived in Guatemala for a decade and is a board member at the Guatemalan women’s health center Asociación Manos Abiertas, another of our Global Partners. She has a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University.

Mary Beth Weinberger worked for 25+ years as a demographer in the United Nations Population Division and was chief of the Population and Development Section when she retired. She received an MA in sociology, with specialization in population studies, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Kevin Whaley has worked for the last 30 years on the development of multipurpose prevention technologies (MPTs), i.e. products that simultaneously prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy. He co-founded Mapp Biopharmaceutical and ZabBio to develop antibody-based MPTs, therapeutics, and mucosal vaccines that are appropriate for large, cost-sensitive, global health markets, including Ebola and other re/emerging infectious diseases.