Three Longtime YSE Educators Retire

After decades of mentoring students and enriching the academic community, Carol Carpenter, Marian Chertow, and Brad Gentry have retired from the Yale School of the Environment.

“These longtime educators exemplify the intellectual rigor and public purpose that define the Yale School of the Environment,” says Dean Indy Burke. “Through their teaching, research, and leadership, they modeled what it means to engage with real-world environmental challenges while inspiring students to think boldly, ethically, and collaboratively.”

Carpenter, a senior lecturer in natural resource social science and an environmental anthropologist, has deepened understanding of the social dimensions of conservation and development through teaching and research on human-environment relationships. Drawing on field experience in Southeast Asia and South Asia, her work has emphasized the importance of cultural context and local knowledge in shaping effective and sustainable environmental solutions.

Chertow, the Manufacturer’s Association Professor of Industrial Ecology, is a pioneer in industrial ecology, having shaped research on industrial symbiosis, the circular economy, and sustainable industrial development. As director of Yale’s Center for Industrial Ecology, she has helped translate research into practice while building global partnerships across academia, industry, and government.

Gentry, the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Professor in the Practice of Forest Resources Management and Policy, is also the outgoing co-director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY). Drawing on experience across more than 40 countries, his work has helped advance innovative approaches to mobilizing private capital for land, water, energy, and conservation projects worldwide.

While their daily presence on campus will be missed, the influence of these educators remains embedded in YSE’s academic programs, research centers, and professional practice initiatives. The school will continue to build on their contributions as new generations of students carry this work forward.

ELTI Expands Field Training to Rwanda

Through the launch of a forest restoration field course in Rwanda, the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) at the Yale School of the Environment is expanding its global network of long-term training landscapes, which also includes sites in Panama, Indonesia, and Brazil.

“Every training landscape has its own character, but they all share the same goal of empowering people to restore ecosystems in ways that are ecologically sound, socially inclusive, and grounded in local realities,” says ELTI director Eva Garen ’95 MES, ’05 PhD.

The course brings together forest restoration and land management practitioners from across western Rwanda. “We wanted to create a living classroom focused on both the why and the how of restoration,” says Grace Bachmann ’23 MF, ELTI’s Rwanda-based program coordinator.

Building on positive feedback, ELTI is developing a leadership program to provide ongoing mentorship for alumni through site visits, including one this past February to Yale-Myers Forest, and tailored support.

A New Roadmap for Urban Tree Planting

YSE researchers helped develop a new data-driven framework for urban tree planting that’s influencing how cities target canopy expansion to maximize public health, heat relief, and equity.

Rather than treating tree cover as a single metric, the framework helps planners, local governments, and nonprofits identify the places where additional trees will do the most good — for example, in neighborhoods experiencing higher temperatures and historic under-investment.

By integrating high-resolution heat data with land-use and social vulnerability indicators, the framework can help guide decisions on where new plantings can be most impactful and feasible, ensuring that shade and cooling benefits reach communities that need them.

“This research shows that strategies to increase tree cover require considering ease of implementation in addition to identifying where a city is hot,” says study co-author Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science and director of the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability.