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6th Annual Sternberg Family Lecture in Public Scholarship

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019

4:30 - 6:00 PM

Shalini Vajjhala is founder & CEO of re:focus partners, a design firm dedicated to developing integrated resilient infrastructure solutions and innovative public-private partnerships for vulnerable communities around the world. She is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution. In addition, she is co-founder of The Atlas, an online community for local governments to find, source, and procure innovative urban solutions.

Previously, Shalini held multiple positions in the Obama Administration, including special representative in the Office of Administrator Lisa Jackson at the US EPA, where she led the US-Brazil Joint Initiative on Urban Sustainability; deputy assistant administrator in the Office of International & Tribal Affairs at EPA; and deputy associate director for Energy & Climate at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She joined the Obama Administration from Resources for the Future, where she was awarded a patent for her adaptation mapping work.

Shalini received her PhD in Engineering & Public Policy and B.Arch in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, and was also a visiting associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where she designed and taught a series of courses on Case Studies in Sustainable Development.

The Colin Powell School Presents the 6th Annual Sternberg Family Lecture in Public Scholarship

The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership is pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of Climate Policy Fellows. In 2019-20, 26 CCNY students—equal numbers of architecture, engineering, science, and social science majors—will participate in an intensive set of workshops culminating in paid internships in Summer 2020 with leading NGOs and think tanks in NYC and Washington, DC.

The program is led by Trevor Houser, a 2006 CCNY alum who is a partner with the Rhodium Group and leads the firm’s Energy and Climate team. He served in the State Department during the Obama administration.

We had more students apply for the Climate Policy Fellows program than for any of our other fellowship programs within the Colin Powell School this year, a signal of the level of concern and engagement among young people around climate change. The community of national policy leaders on climate issues skews wealthy and white. If our program is successful, it can help to diversify the ranks of those who are making decisions on these issues.

You can read the bios for the 2019-20 Climate Policy Fellows here.