Amy Brady and Anthony J. Martin join SSBG Advisory Board
The Sunshine State Biodiversity Group is honored to announce the first two members of its new Advisory Board: Amy Brady and Anthony J. Martin. After a very successful first year, the SSBG heads into 2024 with a new slate of initiatives, and the advisory board will help support intensified efforts in canopy research, environmental education, and land conservation.
“I’m thrilled Brady and Martin have agreed to serve on the advisory board,” said SSBG founder Jeff VanderMeer. “They’re both so proactive, knowledgeable, and imaginative in the environmental space—a real asset to our nonprofit.”
Dr. Brady is the executive director and publisher of Orion magazine and author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—A Cool History of a Hot Commodity, named by NPR and Scientific American as one of the best books of 2023. She is also a contributing editor to Scientific American and co-editor of The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. Brady has made appearances on ABC, the BBC, NPR, and PBS. She holds a PhD in literature and American studies and has won writing and research awards from the National Science Foundation, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Library of Congress.
Dr. Anthony (Tony) J. Martin is a Professor of Practice at Emory University, where he has taught classes in the environmental sciences for more than 30 years. Martin has a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Georgia and is a geologist and paleontologist who studies modern and fossil animal traces, such as tracks, burrows, and nests. He is the author of nine books, including two about traces of Georgia-coast environments—Life Traces of the Georgia Coast and Tracking the Golden Isles—as well as popular books about traces and trace fossils, such as Dinosaurs Without Bones, The Evolution Underground, and Life Sculpted. Martin also developed and taught an online Coursera class on extinctions, Extinctions: Past, Present, and Future, co-taught a Great Courses class Major Transitions in Evolution, and is a popular public speaker. In 2015, in recognition of his scientific achievement and public outreach, he was honored as a Fellow in The Explorers Club and the Geological Society of America. Martin, his wife Ruth, and two cats (Tao and Sapelo) live in Decatur, Georgia.
More advisory board members will be announced throughout the spring, with SSBG’s major projects beginning in the fall of 2024 and continuing through 2025.