Anthony Leiserowitz, PhD
Director

Anthony Leiserowitz is an expert on American and international public opinion on global warming, including public perception of climate change risks, support and opposition for climate policies, and willingness to make individual behavioral change. His research investigates the psychological, cultural, political, and geographic factors that drive public environmental perception and behavior. He has conducted survey, experimental, and field research at scales ranging from the global to the local, including international studies, the United States, individual states (Alaska and Florida), municipalities (New York City), and with the Inupiaq Eskimo of Northwest Alaska. He also recently conducted the first empirical assessment of worldwide public values, attitudes, and behaviors regarding global sustainability, including environmental protection, economic growth, and human development. He has served as a consultant to the John F. Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University), the United Nations Development Program, the Gallup World Poll, the Global Roundtable on Climate Change at the Earth Institute (Columbia University), and the World Economic Forum.  

Lisa Fernandez
Assistant Director

Lisa conducts outreach and communications related to YPCCC research findings and oversees program strategy and operations. Previously, she worked in urban environmental conservation and sustainable development in the US and Latin America. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the World Bank. She was a Fellow at the World Wildlife Fund-USA and a City Planner implementing solid waste prevention policy for the City of New York. Her most recent publications are Toward a New Consciousness:  Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities and Institutionalizing Sustainability in Higher Education.  She serves on the boards of the East Coast Greenway Alliance and the Farmington Canal Rail-to-Trail Association and holds an appointment on the Connecticut Greenways Council.

 

Geoff Feinberg
 

Research Director
 

 

 

 

Geoff joined the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in 2012. Prior to this, he was a vice president at GfK North America, where he specialized in public opinion, thought leadership, social marketing, and strategic communications research.  At GfK, Geoff co-founded and was the GfK director of the Associated Press-GfK Poll, which covers a range of current political and social topics and is one of the most widely reported media polls in the world, reaching upwards of an estimated two billion people monthly. He was also a chief research advisor for the Meth Project, a philanthropic organization devoted to reducing methamphetamine use among teens. In 2011, it was ranked by Barron’s Magazine as the third-most effective philanthropy in the world. In the environmental arena, Geoff served as research consultant to The Sustaining Family Forests Initiative.  He has also conducted national polls on environmental topics for Yale and Stanford.

 

 

 

Tien Ming Lee

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Ming's research program centers on understanding the proximate and ultimate drivers of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. He has assessed the correlates of local and global species extinction risks, addressed the impacts of past and future global land-use and climate change on biodiversity and protected areas, and evaluated the effects of attitudes and behaviors on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services across multiple scales. Ming's long-term research goal is to develop an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to unravel the underlying social drivers of global conservation issues (including climate change) to inform conservation policies and to optimize conservation efforts, particularly in Asia where it may matter the most in the following decades.

Jay Hmielowski

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Jay is studying the how the media affect people’s attitudes and beliefs about global warming. He has two primary lines of research.  His first area of interest is how different types of environmental messages (one-sided and two-sided messages) or the combination of conflicting messages affect the structure of people’s attitudes, and how the complexity (or lack of complexity) of people’s attitudes influences a variety of outcome variables such as seeking out environmental information, information processing and engaging in conservation behaviors. His second area of interest is how partisan media outlets (e.g., FOX News, MSNBC) contribute to the growing ‘belief gap’ between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of climate change. Jay received his BA in communication from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, his MA in communication from Washington State University (Go Cougs!) and his Ph. D. in communication from The Ohio State University.

Megan McVey
Research Assistant

Megan is a first year Master of Environmental Management candidate at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. At F&ES she is investigating how environmental issues are framed by political rhetoric, media and personal experiences. She is also studying how contemporary research methodologies are used to evaluate and quantify reactions to environmental language. Ultimately she wants to address and engage the public in a more sustained and targeted fashion. To do this, she is studying how to frame environmental narratives in ways that will successfully channel public concern into political action and build politically efficacious coalitions between government agencies, industry leaders, and communities. She received her B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Media Studies from the University of Virginia.

 

Aliya Haq
Research Assistant

Aliya is a first-year Masters student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is broadly interested in the U.S. public perception of climate change, and its effect on domestic and international climate policy. Before attending F&ES, Aliya was based in Washington DC with Greenpeace USA as a researcher focused on climate campaigns. Prior to joining the research department, Aliya managed Greenpeace USA's national field program, focused on highlighting climate change as a platform issue in U.S. congressional elections. She has a B.S. from Cornell University in Rural and Environmental Sociology.

 

 

 

 

 

Bonnie Frye Hemphill

Research Assistant

Bonnie is a first-year Masters student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She's interested in sharpening the communications of nonprofit advocacy groups working for solutions to climate change, especially for profitable and practical business propositions. Prior to Yale, Bonnie worked for three years in Seattle at the nonprofit Climate Solutions; there she helped grow its Business Leaders for Climate Solutions network from 125 to more than 1000 clean-economy executives and entrepreneurs advocating for stronger climate policies.  Bonnie is a native of Cary, NC, holds a BA from Middlebury College in Vermont, and enthusiastically pursues adventures and shenanigans whenever possible – from sledding the Presidential Range to canoeing across the Canadian Arctic, rafting the Grand Canyon, tossing Frisbees, quilting, and jumping into cold bodies of water.