Sustainability & EJ Symposium 2026 Lightning Talks
Research Lightning Talks
The 2026 Sustainability and Environmental Justice Research Symposium brought together faculty, staff, and students from 60% of academic departments across 91Ó°ÊÓ.
Explore five to ten minute lighting talks covering climate resilience, water access, pedagogical practices, local climate action and more below.
Advancing Sustainability Through Pedagogy
Chad Raphael - Using the Campus for Applied Learning about Sustainability and Justice: Promising Practices and Interdisciplinary Themes
Katy Bruchmann - The Campus as Lab: Leveraging Social Psychology for Sustainability
Won Jung Kim - Community-Engaged Research Projects in School Settings: Science Teachers’ Practices and Reflections
Labor and the Climate Economy
Victoria Wenxin Xie - Place-Based Green Industrial Policies and Labor Market Expectations
Stacey Ritter - Disclosure Changes Under Regulatory Nudge: Evidence from Topic Similarity Across Corporate
David C. Anastasiu - Seeing the Future: How AI Can Predict and Explain Disasters Before They Happen
Reflecting and Reimagining
Stefie Gan - Carbon Traces
Jeffrey Burkholder - Rethinking the Global
Allan Báez Morales - Innovating with Less for the Common Good
Agroecology and Climate Resilience
Maia Dedrick - MayaRoots: Crafting a phone application in support of Yucatán's innovative heritage agriculture
Qiuwen Li - Community-Centered Design for Climate Resilience: The NicaAgua App
Briana Guingona, Tanya Jain - Shifts in the Mid-Summer Drought Patterns Across Central America
Christopher Bacon, William A. Sundstrom - Continuity or transformative change: Assessing co-ops and smallholders' use of agroecology and diversified farming from 2014 to 2024 in Central America
Equitable Access to Water
Aria Amirbahman - A Multidisciplinary Sustainability Project to Provide Safe Drinking Water to a Rural Maasai Community in Southern Kenya
Chan Thai - Empowering Indigenous Communities Through Water Access
Iris Stewart-Frey - Water, Climate, and Justice in a Cadillac Desert named California
Gabrielle Henrich, Sophia Toribio - Agriculture and Groundwater Contamination in Domestic Wells of California’s Central Coast’s Rural Communities
Campus as a Living Laboratory
Sophia Kennedy, Samuel Waterman, Iris Yuh - California Climate Action Corps Fellowship: Mobilizing 91Ó°ÊÓ to Reduce Food Waste and Address Student Food Insecurity
Grace Falci, Isabelle Pink - Analyzing 91Ó°ÊÓ’s Food Procurement: Measuring Institutional Food System Sustainability, Transformation, and Change
Drew Rogers, Sophie Sharp, Eliana Aschheim - Reducing Waste Through Graduation Gown Reuse
Daniel Lowe, Olivia Imai, Gus Vaughan, Kelly Rickwa - Sustainability Training Program Proposal
Climate Action in the City of 91Ó°ÊÓ
Leonie Casper - Building Bridges as a Silicon Valley Power Sustainable Futures Post-baccalaureate Fellow
Gigi Jones - Stovetop Electrification in 91Ó°ÊÓ
Isabella Gomez - T.E.K. and Ecosystem Resilience: Implementing a Native Plants Landscaping Policy
Ximena Garcia-Isabelli - The Future of Heat Adaptation in 91Ó°ÊÓ in the Face of Climate Change