Nearby Future connects climate, health, and the future of every community.

We fight climate helplessness and complacency at the local level by helping communities understand the health implications of climate change and providing them with individual and policy actions that lead to long term wellbeing and resilience.

An old-growth Pacific Northwest forest, with a mountain visible through a gap in the canopy

Our team

  • Matt Willis

    Matt Willis

    Dr. Matt Willis is a physician and epidemiologist. He served as Marin County, California’s Public Health Officer from 2013 to 2024, where he declared climate change a public health crisis and led science-driven policy and open dialogue with impacted communities to build resiliency. He has served as Director of Primary Care on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, and at the CDC, where he conducted outbreak investigations in the US and abroad. He writes Your Local Epidemiologist in California, translating emerging science into health guidance for the public. His research has been published in Science, JAMA, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and MMWR. He holds an MD from Temple University, and completed his MPH and Internal Medicine training at Harvard.

  • Jim Sheldon, M.S

    Jim Sheldon, M.S

    Jim Sheldon, M.S. is a technical leader with over a decade of experience across industry, academia, and research. He leads various software engineering R&D projects at Northeastern University, including working at Global.health building open epidemic-data infrastructure used by researchers worldwide. He has been published in Nature and The Lancet Infectious Diseases. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University, and currently teaches graduate-level courses there.

  • Samuel Scarpino, PhD

    Samuel Scarpino, PhD

    Samuel V. Scarpino, PhD, is a Professor of Public Health and Health Sciences and the Director of AI + Life Sciences in the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. He also holds appointments in the Network Science and the Roux Institutes. Before joining Northeastern, Scarpino was a Vice President at The Rockefeller Foundation and was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont. He has 15 years of experience translating research into decision-support and data science/AI tools across diverse sectors, from public health and clinical medicine to real estate and energy. From 2017 to 2020, he was Chief Strategy Officer and head of data science at Dharma Platform, a social impact, technology startup, and in 2020 co-founded a data science initiative called Global.health, which has received support from Google.org, the Wellcome Trust, and The Rockefeller Foundation. For his contributions to complex systems science, he has been named a Fellow of the ISI Foundation, an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and an External Faculty member of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute.

  • Joy Sun Cooper

    Joy Sun Cooper

    Joy Sun Cooper is an independent consultant who has launched and scaled organizations solving important social problems, with expertise in behavioral health delivery and novel pharmaceutical commercialization. She served as Chief of Therapy Training and Head of Commercialization at Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS PBC), and co-founded Groups Recover Together, one of the largest opioid use disorder treatment clinic networks in the U.S. She has also served as Director of Operations at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, launching field operations across Africa. A TED Fellow, her 2014 talk explored poverty alleviation through direct cash transfers. She holds a B.S. from Georgetown and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Larry Brilliant
“Change starts with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The path to the extraordinary is open to anybody at any time.”
A rocky Pacific coastline with wildflowers in the foreground and clouds gathering over the water

Board of Directors

  • Suzanne Gilbert, PhD, MPH

    Suzanne Gilbert, PhD, MPH

    Dr. Suzanne Gilbert is a leading expert and respected innovator in the field of international blindness prevention and sight restoration. A public health specialist with over 30 years experience, Dr. Gilbert has spent her career co-designing and implementing eye care service delivery systems for some of the world's poorest communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Dr. Gilbert is a cofounder of Seva Foundation, and currently serves as its Director of The Center for Innovation in Eye Care. The Center promotes new ways to address emerging issues in community eye care and works to develop sustainable eye care services based in locally owned and operated institutions across the globe.

  • Girija Brilliant

    Girija Brilliant

    Girija Brilliant is a public health specialist and epidemiologist who holds a PhD and MPH in social epidemiology from the University of Michigan. She spent a decade in India during the 1970s as part of the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox, work that contributed to ending one of history's deadliest diseases. In Nepal and India, her research helped identify gender and education as key factors preventing rural populations from accessing eye health services, and she served as editor of the Nepal Blindness Survey, the first nationwide survey of blindness in Asia. In 1978, she co-founded the Seva Foundation, an international eye-care organization whose programs have since restored sight to millions of people worldwide.

  • Larry Brilliant

    Larry Brilliant

    Dr. Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist, technologist, author, and philanthropist. A former vice president of Google, Brilliant was the founding executive director of Google.org and later CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, focusing on climate, pandemic, and catastrophic risk. In the 1970s he helped eradicate smallpox as a medical officer with the World Health Organization. He co-founded the Seva Foundation, which has helped restore sight to more than 10 million people in over 20 countries, and co-founded The Well, one of the earliest online communities. He is founder and CEO of Evity Technologies, a preventive medicine company that uses a personalized, evidence-based approach to reduce the time people live with chronic disease and extend lifespan. He holds an M.D. from Wayne State University and an M.P.H. from the University of Michigan, and received the TED Prize and a place on the TIME 100.