Expert Solutionists' Bios 2023-24

Carmen Fleming ‘10

Carmen Fleming is a dedicated advocate for vulnerable communities. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Immediately after graduation, she joined the Peace Corps in Panama, where she served as a Community Economic Development Volunteer from 2010 to 2012.

In 2015, Carmen decided to further her education, earning a Master’s degree in International Public Service from DePaul University in Chicago. With her Economics and International Public Service degrees, she has focused her career on supporting vulnerable populations. Her first job after the Peace Corps was at RefugeeOne, a refugee resettlement agency in Chicago, where she stayed for four years. After RefugeeOne, she decided to take a break from the refugee resettlement field, and spent five years working with victims of crime, domestic violence, and sex crimes in the criminal justice field in New York City.

Carmen returned to the field refugee resettlement, where she is currently serving as an Economic Opportunity Program Specialist with Church World Service. In this role, she plays a pivotal part in supporting programming efforts at offices nationwide. 

Molly Gray

Molly Gray served as Vermont’s 82nd and fourth woman Lieutenant Governor from 2021 to 2023. She was born in Newbury, Vermont and attended the University of Vermont, where she was a Division I cross-country skier. She also attended Vermont Law and Graduate School. Prior to her position as Lieutenant Governor, Gray held a multitude of inspirational positions. She was an aide to US Representative, now Senator, Peter Welch. Gray worked in Geneva for the International Code of Conduct Association, where she launched a human rights monitoring program that led missions in East Africa, Nigeria, and Iraq. In D.C., she was integral to the International Committee of the Red Cross and, during that time, she led missions in Haiti, Uganda, Georgia, the Western Balkans, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition, she served as an Assistant Attorney General for Vermont while simultaneously teaching international human rights law at Vermont Law and Graduate School. During her time as Lieutenant Governor, she provided a forum for Vermonters to discuss issues their communities faced through her virtual “Seat at the Table” series. She hosted hundreds of students and teachers virtually in a program called “Lt. Governor for a Day,” worked with the Vermont National Guard, and co-hosted a Legislative Summit on child care and paid leave. After serving as Lieutenant Governor, Gray accepted an interim position as the first Executive Director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, an organization that assists Afghans who are resettling in Vermont.

Tamar Mayer, Ph.D.

Tamar Mayer is the Robert R. Churchill Professor of Geosciences at Middlebury College and the former director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. She has been at Middlebury since 1985. Her research focuses on the interplay among nationalism, landscape, and memory in stateless nations, including Palestinians, Jews before Statehood, and Uighurs in Xinjiang, China. She is also interested  in other global issues that have caused insecurities and which resulted in forced migration and increased refugee flows. Over her career, she has written about these issues and edited seven volumes, including Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (2000), The Politics of Fresh Water (2017), and Food Insecurity: A Matter of Justice, Sovereignty, and Survival (2020) and Displacement, Belonging and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power  (2022). A believer in exploring the global in the liberal arts, she co-organized and presented at the “Globalizing the Liberal Arts” conference at Soka University of America in 2018.

She continues to give talks at Middlebury and elsewhere, including a Podcast talk in April 2023 called “Israel’s Democracy in Peril” as part of the Rohatyn Center’s program on Autocracy and Democracy. She holds a BA from the University of Haifa, Israel, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Dorn Cox, Ph.D.

Dorn Cox is an organic farmer and Research Director for the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment in Freeport, Maine. Cox co-founded the Farm Hack community and farmOS, a web-based application for farm management, planning and record keeping that aims to provide a platform for agricultural data collection and management. He is a pillar of various other agricultural organizations, as he co-founded the New England Farmers’ Union, serves as the Vice President of the New Hampshire Association of Conservation Districts, and is a National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD) Soil Health Champion. He is the author of The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope, which identifies ways to accelerate regenerative agriculture solutions and explores the critical function that open-source tech can have for promoting these solutions. Cox speaks regularly about participatory science, the exchange of agricultural knowledge, and the importance of soil health and climate-smart agriculture. He holds a PhD in Natural Resources and Earth Systems Science from the University of New Hampshire and a BS from Cornell University.  

Abe Collins

Abe Collins is a grazier, the cofounder of LandStream, Land Care Cooperative, and LandWeb, and the founder of Collins Grazing. LandStream is a consulting company that helps land managers create successful and hardy farms through education, community organizing, and environmental science. The company evaluates the soil health and helps cultivate deep topsoil to promote water retention. Healthy topsoil leads to increased plant yield and the resilience of land to storms, bringing in more revenue to farmers in a sustainable way. In addition, they monitor the soil through advanced technology to record fluctuations and to ensure maximum health and productivity of the soil and watersheds. Collins works with the clients of his company, Collins Grazing, to grow topsoil, which he believes is the renewable resource of the future. Collins is working to maximize Vermont’s land potential. He has given talks, proposed projects, and completed research on this ecological practice.