Grace Curtis is a second-year EPM student who began her role working as an EPM Student Assistant this fall quarter. Her work with the program entails developing outreach and engagement content for various EPM student, faculty, and alumni platforms, and she will also be providing event support. Grace is completing a specialization in sustainable agriculture during her second year in the EPM program, but also prioritizes building skills and experience in data science, environmental justice, climate science, sustainable land management, and community resilience.
On October 1st, we're launching a crowdfund campaign to support experiential learning opportunities for our Environmental Policy and Management students.
When it Rains, it Pours, and Stormwater Infrastructure Breaks
Most of us don’t think about stormwater infrastructure - infrastructure that diverts, stores, and/or filters water, until it breaks. During an intense storm, pipes can break, and storm drains can clog. Poorly maintained stormwater infrastructure leads to chronic flooding and pollution, posing direct threats to human and environmental health.
Every year, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) manual is updated, making the previous year’s manual obsolete. A book treasured by CEQA practitioners, the manual is turned into a dense paperweight that gets heavier each year. At the same time, exemptions to CEQA are limiting this foundational law’s domain.
Between 2014 and 2016, an unprecedented marine heat wave known as “The Blob” spread across the Pacific coast and pushed ocean temperatures off the coast of Northern California several degrees above normal. Along the rocky coastline of the Sonoma Coast, vast underwater forests of bull kelp that support fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals began to disappear. Within just a few years, more than 90% of the region’s bull kelp canopy had collapsed.
I grew up in the small foothills town of Jamestown, California, and now live in Sacramento with my husband and two daughters. My career spans research and policy contexts and has taken me from Los Angeles to India, northern New York to Sacramento. I have a BA from Scripps College in Claremont, CA, and an MA and PhD from UCLA.
This EPM alum graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a B.S. in Environmental Earth Sciences before completing the EPM program in 2025 with a specialization in Sustainable Food Systems. They now work as a Senior Environmental Scientist Specialist at CalRecycle, serving as a lead technical and policy expert on extended producer responsibility. They credit EPM with strengthening their project management, collaboration, and policy skills while preparing them for career growth within the State of California.
What if one of the most widespread pollutants on Earth was already in your body? You may have consumed microplastics today without realizing it. They could have been in your bottled water, floating through the air, or shed from the clothes on your back. Once considered a distant ocean pollution issue, microplastics are now found in Antarctic ice, deep ocean trenches, mountain peaks, and even in human blood and brain tissue.
With the Sacramento County Office of Planning and Environmental Review, Junna leveraged advanced geospatial modeling techniques to determine the extent, distribution, and quality of urban tree cover in Sacramento County’s Environmental Justice (EJ) Communities to inform the County’s upcoming Urban Forest Management Plan.
by Kiri Basher, Kulsum Hussain, Marisa Rodriguez, and Faith Sunga
Graduate school is a balancing act. Between coursework, internships, commuting, and personal commitments, finding time to recharge can feel like a challenge. Yet for many students in the Environmental Policy and Management (EPM) program, balance isn't about doing everything perfectly; it's about creating routines that make busy weeks more manageable.
We spoke with four incoming second-year EPM students, Marisa Rodriguez, Kiri Basher, Kulsum Hussain, and Faith Sunga, about how they navigate graduate school while gaining valuable professional experience. Although each student has a unique career path, their experiences reveal common themes of organization, self-care, and finding small ways to recharge.
