John-Ben Soileau is a program officer for the Board on Environmental Change and Society at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where he has worked on climate resilience and community engagement efforts since 2019. His work integrates multidisciplinary perspectives with local experiential knowledge to mitigate the damage and decrease the suffering of communities impacted by environmental disruptions. He is the director of the National Academies consensus study. He managed a retreat in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region, which utilizes the lived experiences of Gulf Coast residents at risk of climate-induced displacement. Soileau has a BA in anthropology from the University of New Orleans, an MA in Latin American studies from Tulane, and is finalizing a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which involved years of ethnographic fieldwork about environmental governance with quilombo (maroon) communities in the Brazilian Amazon. He also volunteers as the Brazil coordinator for the Minga Foundation, a non-profit that collaborates with underserved communities to improve socio-economic and health equity.