Bernadette Woods Placky is Climate Central's VP for Engagement, Chief Meteorologist, and directs the Climate Matters program where she helps the public understand the importance of climate change science, impacts, and solutions. In her role, she develops partnerships with media organizations, non-profits, and academic institutions; leads a team that creates weekly, local data and other reporting resources for a large and growing network of media professionals; and serves as an expert on the links between climate change and weather.

Bernadette previously worked for more than a decade as a TV meteorologist, where she won an Emmy for Best Weathercaster. Other awards include being named an AMS fellow and Penn State Earth and Mineral Science fellow.

She's been elected to the AMS Council, National Academy Board of Atmospheric Science and Climate, chaired the Penn State Meteorology and Atmospheric Science advisory committee, is on The Weather Channel's Pattrn Board, and is a science advisor for C-Change Conversations. She also serves on the Princeton Wrestling Club Board. Bernadette previously served on the Penn State GEMS and Watershed Institution Boards.

Bernadette graduated from Penn State University with a BS in Meteorology and a minor in French.

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President's Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, "sludge" (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

He served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, where he focused on resilience against weather-related risks (such as flooding and extreme heat) and on reduction of administration burdens; he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department's highest civilian honor, in 2024.

Dr. Perfecto is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Washington University in St. Louis. She studies myriad topics within decision making, often centered around the antecedents and consequences of the ease with which we make everyday decisions. Many of her projects have a secondary goal to improve how research is done by assessing previous work and considering its ability to have real-world impact. Her research has been published in top journals in both marketing and psychology, and has earned her the MSI Young Scholar award from the Marketing Science Institute and the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making. Prior to joining the faculty at Olin, she received a PhD from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BSc in Psychology from Yale University.