Dr. Thomas Henry Culhane is the Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Concentration director at the Patel College of Global Sustainability, as well as the co-founding director of the not-for-profit educational corporation "Solar CITIES Inc." His work focuses on solving urban ecology and development issues surrounding wastewater, solid waste, food security, and decentralized clean energy production. He is a board member of the Rosebud Continuum Sustainability Education Center and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and United Religions Initiative. As a National Geographic Emerging Explorer since 2009, Culhane has introduced his low-cost biodigester designs to community leaders in many African and Middle Eastern countries, working to stop deforestation, soil erosion, wildfires, and indoor air pollution. He has gone around the world with the US Embassy and State Department teaching others to innovate, design and construct their own home-scale biodigester and vertical aeroponic systems out of low-cost local materials as part of his "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer" initiative. Before joining USF, Culhane was a professor at Mercy College New York, teaching courses in Environmental Sustainability and Justice, Environmental Psychology, and Urban Ecology. He was a Google Science Fair Judge for seven years and worked with the US Office of Naval Research and UCLA on STEM science education projects with at-risk youth. Culhane got his Ph.D. from UCLA in Urban Planning, living and working on solar energy and waste management projects with the trash recycling communities of Cairo Egypt, and his Master's in Regional and International Development working on urban agroforestry issues in the Peten forests of Guatemala. His undergraduate work at Harvard included a Rockefeller Fellowship studying for a year in the primary rainforests of Borneo, following orangutans and working on community ecology issues with hunter-gatherer tribes. Culhane's mission is to empower communities to regain ecological self-sufficiency and economic security through regenerative systems integration.