Our Team

Dr. Meryl Shriver-Rice, R.P.A. is a Research Manager for the Seminole Tribe of Indian’s Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum educating the public on the fight for Indigenous sovereignty. As director of CHART, she is a decolonial anthropologist and environmental archaeologist, who focuses on oral histories, ethnobiology, decolonial public anthropology, and environmental justice. She is the author of Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying (with Sarah Hiepler).

Dr. Brittany Brown is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Director of Archaeology at Beaver Dam Plantation at Davidson College. Her regional areas of specialization include the African American Southeast and the British Caribbean, and her cultural heritage work centers on community engagement and collaboration.

Uzi Baram is professor emeritus at New College of Florida, where he taught anthropology and founded the New College Public Archaeology Lab. Lead archaeologist that recovered material traces of the early 19th century Angola maroon community on the Manatee River, Dr. Baram continues to support the Back to Angola Festival.

Nina is a structural engineer and Ph.D. candidate whose work bridges engineering, cultural heritage, and climate science. With a decade of experience in engineering and preservation, she now develops transdisciplinary, community-driven frameworks to assess cultural landscape resilience, integrating human-nature relationships and relational values into resilience decision-making.

Stefan Moss is an environmental scientist, educator and founder of the Saltwater Underground Railroad Experience. He serves as Board President of the Environmental Education Alliance of Georgia, and is pursuing a Ph.D in Science Education from Georgia State University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Black/Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, fugitivity and liberation through STEM.

Clay Ewing is a designer, developer, and educator whose work spans game design, storytelling, and social impact. He leads NERDLab, an academic game studio at the University of Miami that creates interactive systems addressing topics such as public health, identity, equity, and climate resilience. The lab’s work ranges from rapid prototypes to award-winning games, often developed in collaboration with students and community partners.

Sara Ayers-Rigsby specializes in cultural resources management and historic preservation. As the Director for the Florida Public Archaeology Network’s Southeast/Southwest Regions, Ayers-Rigsby is responsible for designing educational outreach and programming for Florida’s southernmost 9 counties which comprise half of the state’s population.

Lori Lee is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Flagler College. Her research interests include the African Diaspora, materiality of memory, medicinal practices, consumerism, migration, and indigenous experiences in St. Augustine, Florida.

Grace Turner is with the Antiquities, Monuments Museum Corporation, promoting the presentation and understanding of Bahamian history and heritage. Her book, Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space: The Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century African-Bahamian Cemetery was published in November 2017, University Press of Florida.

Karen Herrero Backe is a doctoral candidate at the University of Miami investigating pedagogy interventions to diversify STEM through game play and advancing equity in climate futures through justice-oriented adaptation. She holds an MS in Marine Science Biogeography from San Francisco State University and has worked globally in field science.

Kyle Walkine is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. His research centers around journalism, capacity building for journalists and environmental reporting within the Caribbean. He is also a trained broadcaster, having worked as a news anchor/journalist within his home country of The Bahamas for 10 years.