People

Anne Umali has been working in the environmental education field since 2000 and has built a strong passion for teaching and training others, especially when it comes to leadership training, community engagement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anne's connection to NAAEE goes back to 2013 when she was the project manager for the U.S. EPA’s National Environmental Education & Training Program (EECapacity, then ee360, then later ee360+). Today she's the Director of Leadership, Conservation, and International Programs at NAAEE. 

CTE Teacher at Tanapag Middle School for 23 years, planning to open a club focusing on Environmental Education and Conservation

Bora Simmons serves as the founding director of the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education. The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) initiated the Project in 1993 to help educators develop and deliver effective environmental education programs. The Project has drawn on the insights of literally thousands of educators across the United States and around the world to craft guidelines for top-quality environmental education.

I have been teaching biology, Honors Biology, Anatomy and Physiology, and AP Biology for 20 years at Three Rivers High School in Three Rivers, MI. I love teaching outdoors when possible and hope to instill a love of the outdoors in my students. I enjoy incorporating place-based education activities into my curriculum and find that students get very invested in these activities. 

I live in beautiful Stokes County NC with my husband and our 3 sons. I enjoy hiking and exploring nature. I've always been drawn to the outdoors, be it wildIife critters, amazing views of the sky, or trying to identify trees and wildflowers/ plants. I am an advid star gazer. I began working at Hanging Rock State Park in 2022.  

Austin D. Le, MS, teaches future and current clinicians how climate change affects health and how to practice sustainably. At the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria, he developed a team-based learning clinical case competition for medical students and led two Planetary Health Report Cards, helping bring climate health into core teaching for over 300 students annually and create a public resource site. Nationally, he convened a research conference for over 70 trainees and now leads a 10-student research literacy program with The Journal of Climate Change and Health. The first medical student on his hospital's sustainability committee, he studies lower-emission inhaler care. He leads research studying climate impacts on young people's physical and mental health.

International Partnerships Coordinator at the Center for Environmental Information and Communication of North America (Ciceana). Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sustainability from Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City, with experience designing, managing, and evaluating sustainability projects across different regions of Mexico.

I seek to contribute to addressing environmental challenges by recognizing the relationships between people, territories, and institutions. I am particularly interested in community development, conservation, environmental governance, and socio-environmental justice.

I am an outdoor educator leading in summer camps, preschool and afterschool programs.

I am the Project Manager for the SHARP (Skills for Health and Research Professionals) Program based at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The SHARP Program consists of short, intensive boot camps led by field experts to teach in-demand research skills and methods to investigators at all career levels and from any organization.