Molly Burhans

Molly combines her passion for people and the planet with her experience in design thinking, business development, and scientific research to understand and transform complex systems, manage diverse teams, and communicate ideas and processes through broadly-accessible media that brings people together.

Molly is an Ashoka Fellow (2018). Molly was the Chief Cartographer for the first global data-based maps of the Catholic Church and has exhibited these on numerous occasions in the Vatican.

Molly has an M.S. in Ecological Design from the Conway School, where she was her class’ Sustainable Communities Initiative Fellow and a B.A. in Philosophy from Canisius College. She worked in a yeast genetics lab and has designed and developed professional graphic and web media for over ten years, some of which have been featured in publications such as Landscape Architecture Magazine, Nucleic Acids Research, and the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence proceedings. She co-founded GroOperative, Inc. 5(a), an indoor-vertical farming worker-owned cooperative in Buffalo, NY, the USA in 2013. She has been involved with the Vatican Youth Symposium, Vatican Arts and Technology Council, United Nations Youth Assembly, and the Buckminster Fuller Catalyst program and is an Echoing Green Fellowship finalist. She has also been an invited speaker at numerous conferences and institutions, including but not limited to Harvard University, Yale University, Esri, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and ICT4D.