Renia Ehrenfeucht is a Professor and the Chair of the Community + Regional Planning Department at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning.

She also currently serves as the Central Region Representative of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Governing Board.

Dr. Ehrenfeucht is inspired by all transformational social action to create socially just and equitable institutions, environmentally sustainable societies, and vibrant economies that sustain cultural differences as well as traditional and new ways of life. Her research and teaching is motivated by the belief that committed social action can dismantle colonialism and racism and create ways of living that respect diverse people and all species.

Her research explores how people reshape built environments. One focus is public spaces and the politics of everyday life, examining how ordinary spaces and local institutions influence people’s opportunities in diverse environments. She has written about food trucks, street work and Airbnb as moments to explore urban transformation in work, daily life and the right to the street. She also studies shrinking cities and how people, places and institutions respond to population loss. In this area, she has written about disaster recovery in New Orleans as a shrinking city and the reasons that people choose to live in shrinking cities which often have limited amenities and work opportunities.

Her books include Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation in Public Space (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris) and Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World (with Carl Grodach). She also has written numerous journal articles which are listed under Scholarship + Publications.

Allison Bennett Irion is a systems engineer, with a focus on nuclear non-proliferation and supply chain security. Allison is the chair of the Advanced Supply Chain Analytics (ASCA) team, which is a joint initiative between Strategic Security Sciences (S³) and Decision and Infrastructure Sciences (DIS) on end-to-end supply chain solutions that assure the supply of materials critical to U.S. strategic interests and deny the supply of proliferation-sensitive goods to adversaries. She serves as Argonne’s relationship manager for DOE/NNSA’s Global Material Security (GMS/NA-21) Office, which she has supported as a technical expert for over 15 years and she co-leads a rare-earth supply chain team that supports DOD’s Defense Logistics Agency. 

Previously, Allison was a Senior Systems Engineer at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque and DC) and most recently was NA-21’s forward deployed expert in London, UK, supporting their radiation detection work in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Allison has led maritime threat modeling efforts, equipment testing and installation campaigns for several U.S. government agencies and international partners, including supporting the IAEA and the Olympic Games.

She is an appointed member of the Research, Innovation and Strategy subcommittee for APICS, a 45,000 member supply chain professional group and Supply Chain Strategy has published her research on the impacts of container security legislation to global supply chains. Allison serves as an officer in both the U.S. Navy Reserve and U.S. Merchant Marine.

Dr. Suresh Sunderrajan is Associate Laboratory Director for Advanced Energy Technologies (AET) at Argonne National Laboratory. He leads an organization of scientists, engineers, and analysts working to enable a sustainable, secure, equitable, and prosperous energy future. AET solves the most pressing energy, mobility, materials, and manufacturing challenges by using the laboratory’s world-class scientific and engineering expertise and facilities. The AET team collaborates with internal and external partners on cutting-edge research, development, demonstration, and deployment of clean energy technologies.

Dr. Sunderrajan was previously the Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Global Security, from which the Advanced Energy Technologies and Nuclear Technologies and National Security directorates were formed in 2022. In that role, he led an organization that applied crosscutting expertise in science, engineering, and technology to develop solutions to challenging problems related to energy, transportation, manufacturing, and global security including nuclear nonproliferation, CBRN threat detection and critical infrastructure security.

Before that, he served as Associate Laboratory Director for Science and Technology Partnerships and Outreach, Argonne’s commercialization and licensing organization which works with the laboratory’s research directorates to develop strategies that sustain and expand Argonne’s relationships with industry, academia, government, and other sectors.

Prior to his career at Argonne, Dr. Sunderrajan worked at United Technologies Corporation, where he served as Director of Innovation Business Development, the Corporate Intellectual Property monetization organization that is responsible for patent and technology licensing, patent sales, and new business incubation opportunities. Before working at United Technologies Corporation, Dr. Sunderrajan was a seasoned entrepreneur who was part of the founding teams for four different start-ups.

Dr. Sunderrajan also worked at the International Copper Association, where he supervised several globally dispersed, early-stage technology commercialization activities; at Eastman Kodak Company, where he led the commercialization of several generations of photographic imaging supports, led the creation of a silver nanomaterial-based antimicrobial business, and was a Director with the Corporate Venture Capital group; and at Union Camp Corporation (International Paper) as a Senior Process Engineer, where he led the first alkaline conversion of a coated board machine in the United States.

He holds more than 30 U.S. patents and received the Distinguished Inventor Award at Eastman Kodak. He is a Certified Licensing Professional. Dr. Sunderrajan earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, and his Master of Science in Management and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.