An interdisciplinary legal scholar with a background in climate science.

Great to meet you!

Passionate about the intersection of law and climate science, I recently received my JD-PhD from Stanford and am an Assistant Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.

Climate change is one of the defining crises of our generation. In response to robust scientific research on anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions causing climate change, scientists, policymakers, and civil society alike have called for swift action to curb and reduce these emissions. Yet the global community still fails to act appropriately to avert the most severe consequences of unmitigated climate change. What are some of the key barriers to implementing these mitigation efforts?

My scholarship aims to address this question, with interests in connecting climate science, law, policy, and justice. I am interested in making climate science more legally literate and how systems change approaches can be applied to climate law and policy. In the past, I’ve also been interested in how ecological and policy systems can be better integrated for climate goals. As a former climate justice community organizer, I am also passionate about and recognize the importance of justice-based climate policies. Academically, this interest in climate justice takes on many forms, from community-based participatory action research at the United Nations climate negotiations to youth and faculty engagement in the fossil fuel divestment movement.

In particular, my doctoral research centered on GHG accounting as a process within this science-law-policy-justice interface. How we measure and account for GHG emissions forms the bedrock of climate change policies. Greenhouse gas inventories are essential to the success of global mitigation efforts, particularly in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Paris Agreement, which relies on national-level GHG emissions reduction commitments and reporting. To date, GHG inventory science has been approached mainly by the natural sciences. My dissertation contributes to a relatively small and critically important academic community: the law and policy of inventorying itself. Some of my research centers on better understanding GHG inventorying processes and how they can be improved from city to global scales. I am currently working on legal research on both improving GHG accounting as well as the impact of greenhouse gas accounting in exacerbating environmental injustices.

*Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ dispossession, and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ people, past and present, to these lands and waters.