Dr. Clive Lipchin was born in South Africa and raised in Johannesburg.  Clive received his first degree in applied psychology and zoology with an emphasis on wildlife management on private game farms in South Africa’s Northern Province.  Clive immigrated to Israel in 1991 and received a master’s degree in desert ecology from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 1996, he left Israel to pursue a PhD in resource ecology management at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. The focus of Clive’s PhD was public perceptions and attitudes towards water scarcity in Israel.

Clive joined the faculty of the Arava Institute in 2003 where he teaches a multidisciplinary course on water management in the Middle East.  Clive oversees research projects, workshops, and conferences that focus on transboundary water and environmental problems facing Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. His specialty is in water resources management and policy.   Currently, Clive is coordinating the TransBasin—Transboundary Water Basin Management Project, a project funded by the International Research Staff Exchange Scheme of the European Union. This project brings together researchers from Europe and the Middle East to study conflict and cooperation in river basin management and to identify the principles and mechanisms that both promote and hinder cooperation in river basins in Europe and the Middle East. Clive is also coordinating a USAID funded project on mitigating transboundary wastewater conflicts between Israel and Palestine and is conducting research on solar powered desalination of brackish groundwater in the Gaza Strip.

Clive has published and presented widely on the topic of transboundary water management in the Middle East and has served as the senior editor on two books: “Integrated Water Resources Management in the Middle East”, and “The Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin: Cooperation Amid Conflict”. Since the online publication on Oct 9th, 2009 of  “The Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin: Cooperation Amid Conflict” there has been a total of 2,440 chapter downloads of the book making it one of the top 50% most downloaded eBooks in the Springer eBook Collection of 2012.

Scott Moore is a political scientist whose work focuses on water politics and policy, especially in China and South Asia. Scott is currently a Senior Fellow at the Penn Water Center as well as Director of China Programs in the Office of the Provost at the University of Pennsylvania.

Until 2018, Scott was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist with the World Bank Water Global Practice, where he co-led a study of China’s water sector with the Development Research Center of the State Council and was a co-author of two flagship reports, High and Dry: Climate Change, Water, and the Economy, and Uncharted Waters: the New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability. Previously, Scott served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change, and prior to that was Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University.

He has published widely on the full range of global water issues in leading publications including Nature, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. Scott holds a doctorate in Politics and a master’s degree in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton.

Dr. Shanna N. McClain serves a dual role as Manager of the Earth Sciences Division Global Partnerships with Mercy Corps, Conservation International, Microsoft, and Google, while also advising the Applied Sciences Program on risk reduction & resilience. Dr. McClain endeavors to define NASA’s role in resilience through the development of partnerships and projects in fragile and crisis-affected communities, and by exploring innovative methods and integrated approaches for bringing Earth observations and humanitarian actors together for building more risk-informed human and environmental systems.

Dr. McClain holds a PhD in Environmental Resources & Policy from Southern Illinois University. Her doctoral research examined the challenges of integrating three science and policy priorities – climate change adaptation, response to disasters, and resilience – into multilevel governance frameworks of international river basins. She previously worked with the Joint UN OCHA / UN Environment Unit, which focused on the integration of environmental risk in humanitarian settings. Her research and experience now bolster her work with NASA, where her efforts are focused on advancing science-informed decision making in situations of sudden-onset and protracted humanitarian crisis.