JR Diaz-Hernandez goes by the initials of two men. The J is his great-grandfather. The R is Roberto, the grandfather who helped raise him through his first nine years. He is now the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, protecting public health across Central Ohio through forecasting, alerts, and neighborhood-level air monitoring. It started in Oak Cliff, a Dallas neighborhood where everything he needed sat within walking distance, where a Salvadoran family sold pupusas two for a dollar half a block from his elementary school, and where neighbors kept getting priced out one by one. He had no word for walkable yet, and no word for displacement. He just noticed people leaving. Low income and the first in his family to go to college, he bounced between majors at Amherst until he sat in a library and thought, if only there was a field of study that studied people. Anthropology and environmental sociology handed him the vocabulary for what he had already lived: why the affordable houses in his city sat closest to the airport and the municipal dump, and why fishing families could describe a changing climate long before any report reached them. He spent six years earning a master's in public health while working full time and riding as a volunteer EMT, built guitars and canoes in the gaps, and landed in Ohio because his partner chose Ohio State. Then came the MORPC job that was never advertised. Every turn in the story comes back to people, which is the common thread he names himself, and he carries it to this year's Summit on Sustainability with a PechaKucha talk about something most adults have quietly stopped doing, which is going outside to play. Ask him why any of it matters and he answers with a question of his own. Did you breathe air today? Episode in a glance 00:05 The Two Grandfathers Behind the Initials 06:57 The Louisiana Site That Vanished Under Water 11:15 Why the Affordable Houses Were Closest to the Dump 14:16 The World's Too Big of a Place to Be Bored 17:59 The Job That Was Never Advertised About JR Diaz-Hernandez Mauro "JR" Diaz-Hernandez is the air quality and sustainability program manager at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), where he works to protect public health and improve air quality across Central Ohio through daily forecasting and alerts, neighborhood-level air monitoring, and sustainability programming with partners across the region. Born and raised in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, he was the first in his family to go to college, earning degrees in anthropology and sociology from Amherst College and later a master's in public health from the University of Connecticut. Before MORPC he worked with the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, helped low income and first generation students get into and through college, and served as program administrator for the Center on Climate Change and Health at the Yale School of Public Health. He has volunteered as an EMT with the Mystic River Ambulance Association, worked with therapy horses, and taught at a nature center. He leads MORPC's Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network (CLEAN) and speaks at the annual Summit on Sustainability. Connect with JR Diaz-Hernandez and his work with MORPC JR Diaz-Hernandez on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/maurodiazhernandez/MORPC air quality programs, including forecasts, alerts, and neighborhood monitoring → morpc.org/airqualityEmail JR directly → airquality@morpc.orgMid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission → morpc.orgSummit on Sustainability → morpc.org/summitSend us a message!
