Master’s Admissions

Indigenous Restoration Approaches

As co-founder and executive director of Shelterwood, Nikola Alexandre ’18 MF, MBA leads the restoration of a 900-acre forest in Northern California with Black and Indigenous community approaches to land care.

His work creates partnerships with and between traditional conservation NGOs, Indigenous and racial justice organizations, government agencies, and private landowners to model socially just and ecologically sound pathways to protecting and restoring nature. In 2020, Alexandre was named a Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award candidate for his work.

Preserving China’s Biodiversity

As the executive director of the Shan Shui Conservation Center in China, Irene Xiangying Shi ’13 MESC is helping conservation efforts in the Tibetan Plateau and southern regions. The Center focuses its work on urban ecosystems and endangered species, such as giant pandas and snow leopards. 

“If we have the right incentives,” she says, “people will conserve nature in the best way." Her efforts have helped build a biodiversity conservation alliance, an information sharing platform on biodiversity, and long-term funding mechanisms to continue work on these issues.

Waste Warrior

As founding chair of the New York City Public Housing Authority Recycling Committee, DeNeile Cooper ’22 MEM is working to boost recycling efforts in public housing units.

Only 2% of waste from NYCHA units is recycled. Nationally, that rate is 32%.

“This work has been successful so far because it involves a variety of stakeholders who bring unique perspectives to create programs that work for everyone,” says Cooper, who is a member of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board.

Mapping Panama’s Sustainable Farmlands

A researcher for the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative, Cecilia Rogers ’22 MFS is mapping the success of ELTI’s Panama program that helps cattle ranchers incorporate sustainable practices, such as the use of forested pastureland, into their land management.

Working with fellow students, she found that the amount of sustainably managed farmland had significantly increased from 4% in 2011 to 66% in 2020.

Working to Make the Midwest Greener and Cleaner

As the climate solutions director at Clean Wisconsin, a nonprofit whose mission is to fight for clean air and water in the state, Chelsea Chandler ’10 MEM is working to protect one of Wisconsin’s most effective programs: Focus on Energy, the statewide energy efficiency program.

By helping people buy efficient lightbulbs or tune up their grain dryers, Focus on Energy has been an enormous success, and Chandler says that evaluations of the program have consistently shown huge returns for the investments.

Climate Justice for Cities

As a public school teacher in New York City watching socially marginalized Black and Latinx students struggle with inequalities in education and health issues from an emerging lead poisoning crisis, A.J. Hudson ’19 MESc was moved to take action. He helped found a public high school and led neighborhood workshops on climate justice and political action efforts.

He also helped organize coalitions to pass New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and helped plan the 2019  Youth Climate Summit, the nation’s largest gathering of young people of color passionate about climate change.