Climate Mitigation, Three Ways: How These Bekenstein Climate Leaders Are Shaping the Global Climate Transition

Somewhere inside the regulatory filings of the United States’ regional power markets, the systems that keep much of the nation’s electricity flowing, sits a body of work shaped in part by Mandakini Chandra ’25 MEM.

As a policy associate at Jupiter Power, a U.S. leader in battery storage deployment, Chandra tracks the rulemaking that determines whether energy storage gets built and what it gets paid for, helping keep the grid stable as more wind and solar come online. It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes work that rarely makes headlines but can shape how fast the country’s grid can absorb clean energy, and it’s exactly the kind of work the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program was designed to make possible.

The program supports the next generation of environmental leaders at YSE and Yale through three forms of support, each requiring a separate application: scholarship funding to ease the cost of the degree, a paid summer internship to test out real climate mitigation work, and a post-graduate stipend that helps make it possible to pursue a role chosen for its mission rather than its salary. Three alumni who received all three components of that support — Ethan Cypull ’25 MEM, Dula Rundasa Wereti ’25 MEM, and Chandra — are putting that foundation to work in U.S. wholesale power markets, Ethiopian watershed restoration, and state-level clean energy permitting.

Ethan Cypull:
Unsticking the Interconnection Bottleneck

A member of the Bekenstein program’s inaugural cohort, Cypull’s path has taken something of a loop: out of Minnesota, through Yale, and back to Minnesota again, but transformed along the way.

He’s an associate project developer at EDF power solutions, developing utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage projects across the country — work he sees as a direct continuation of his YSE experiences.

“I plan on continuing my work at the intersection of renewable energy and climate change,” he said, “while staying involved in urban forestry, volunteering, and mentoring younger environmental professionals on the side.”

Driven by research on environmental challenges in his home state, he arrived at Yale after earning a degree in Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. At YSE, he built a reputation as an engaged voice on campus and in the community, writing for the Yale Environment Review and receiving the Student Learning Community Leadership Award.

Cypull’s Bekenstein-funded summer internship placed him with the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), where he worked on one of the clean energy transition’s persistent chokepoints: interconnection.

“Interconnection is the process by which energy projects plug into the wider power grid,” he explained. “Before a project can connect, it must undergo a series of studies of its grid impact — a process that can take years and slow renewable deployment nationwide.”

Cypull’s work focused on identifying opportunities for state energy offices to support a more efficient interconnection process, groundwork that now informs how he thinks about siting and developing projects at EDF.

As one of the Bekenstein program’s first scholars, he’s also shaped it informally, offering advice to new applicants and interested students on what to expect through what he describes as coffee chats, text messages, and emails.

The program’s impact reached well beyond his time in New Haven. “The scholarship allowed me to get ahead on paying off my student loans,” he said.

“Being in a stronger financial position than when I started the program has had a positive ripple effect on my overall quality of life,” he added. “I sincerely hope this program continues to help first-generation students like me break into new fields and reduce the burden of student loans.”

Dula Rundasa Wereti:
Making Supply Chains Legible, One Data Point at a Time

As the lead forest carbon and geospatial analyst for the Integrated Haramaya Lake Watershed Development Initiative at Haramaya University in Ethiopia, Wereti leads carbon assessments, geospatial analysis, and ecosystem restoration monitoring. The work builds directly on the technical foundation he built as a Bekenstein Climate Leader at YSE and during his Bekenstein-funded summer internship at World Resources Institute (WRI).

In 2023, Rundasa Wereti, a lecturer and natural resource management specialist leading watershed rehabilitation and afforestation research at Haramaya University in Ethiopia, read a Reuters article about a new EU law that would prevent the import of commodities linked to deforestation. Realizing what that regulation would mean for industries sourcing raw materials from developing countries, he set out to help build the data infrastructure to address it.

“My work at WRI focused on developing a soybean production emission factor table, using Brazil as a case study,” Wereti said. “The outcome is planned to be integrated into public tools such as Global Forest Watch, which will help industries better understand the carbon footprint of soybeans based on where they are sourced.”

Though the geography differs — Brazilian soybean fields versus Ethiopian watersheds — Wereti sees a clear throughline between that internship and his work now. “Deforestation and land-use change are among the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “Knowing that my work will contribute to a resource that helps people and industries make climate-informed decisions is one of the most satisfying moments of my career.”

Wereti noted that support he received through the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program gave him the room to focus on that work without financial distraction. “I am immensely grateful for the Bekenstein program's financial support,” he said. “It has been a great relief and has enabled me to focus more fully on my work.”

Mandakini Chandra:
From Policy Research to Power Markets

Chandra’s route to Yale ran through New Delhi and Mumbai, where she worked for years as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, helping draft technical input for India’s national long-term decarbonization strategy.

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A Bekenstein Climate Leaders scholarship helped bring her to the Yale School of the Environment to pursue a Master of Environmental Management. Her studies in evidence-based policy work shaped her approach to her Bekenstein-funded summer internship at World Resources Institute. Throughout the three-month internship, she supported the team’s research on the next generation of Nationally Determined Contributions — the country-level climate plans at the center of the Paris Agreement — for Indonesia and South Africa.

“My work involved assisting the team with research, data collection, and writing on the most viable pathways to decarbonize the Indonesian and South African economies across sectors,” Chandra said.

That internship surfaced the grid-integration question that now defines her day job and reshaped her sense of where she could have the most impact. “My current role also relates to climate mitigation, but in a radically different way, and in a completely different economic and social context,” she said.

Her advice to incoming Bekenstein scholars starting their own internships: figure out fast what you bring to the table. “Make sure you’re learning how to be most useful to the team that you’re working with,” Chandra advised. “Build strong relationships with your bosses, mentors, and other colleagues. Learn as much as you can, ask questions frequently, and be as entrepreneurial as you can in taking on new work.”

Though Chandra, Wereti, and Cypull each took separate career paths, what connects all three is the range of possibilities the Bekenstein Climate Leaders Program opened up for them to choose their paths deliberately: a scholarship that eased financial strain during the MEM, an internship that let each of them test out and often redirect their sense of where they could have the most impact, and a stipend that helped make it possible to land in a role aligned with their values rather than the first offer on the table.

As Chandra put it, reflecting on her own path from Delhi to WRI to Jupiter Power: “These aren’t different worlds solving different problems. It’s the same problem — decarbonizing a global economy still built on fossil fuels — viewed from wherever you happen to be standing.”