Jim Connell is executive director of Poverello House, a private, nonprofit, nondenominational organization serving the hungry, the homeless and the destitute in Fresno. Poverello House serves three meals a day, 365 days a year, to anyone in need. It also offers free medical and dental care through the Holy Cross Clinic, provides showers and laundry services, serves as a day shelter and safe haven for people on the streets, houses a 28-bed residential alcohol and drug rehabilitation program and a five-bed transitional home, and offers temporary overnight shelter.
Dr. J. Luis Batista is medical director for the Fresno Native American Health Center (FNAHC), a nonprofit community-based organization serving the health care needs of urban Native Americans and Alaska Natives in Fresno.
Carmen Burgos is program manager for the Kern Health Consumer Center (KHCC), a service agency that helps low-income residents of Kern County navigate the health care system. KHCC is a project of Greater Bakersfield Legal Assistance, a nonprofit organization offering free legal services in civil matters to low-income residents of Kern County. KHCC is a part of the Health Consumer Alliance, a united effort of nine legal services agencies to address the health access problems of California consumers, particuarly low-income consumers.
Dr. Bonnie Bade is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on farm worker health, health care, California agriculture and farm labor, transnational migration, and ethnomedicine and ethnobotany among peoples of both indigenous Oaxaca and indigenous Southern California. Dr. Bade has worked with Mixtec communities in California, the San Diego/Tijuana border region, the San Joaquin Valley, and Oaxaca for over 15 years. Dr. Bade earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Riverside in 1994.
Anthony Wexler, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis, studies how very small particles -- measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter -- contribute to air pollution and affect human health and climate. Wexler believes the role of these atmospheric nanoparticles is one of the largest unknowns in understanding global climate change. Clouds form when water droplets form around nanoparticles, and the thickness and whiteness of clouds affects how much heat from the sun is reflected back into space.
