Building Scientific Leaders for a Resilient Future

Building Scientific Leaders for a Resilient Future

This year, students were tasked with creating an inspiring, action-oriented, and powerful tagline for the Environmental Policy and Management. program. After receiving a multitude of nominations, students voted to adopt "building scientific leaders for a resilient future" as the new tagline for the program. First-year student, Kriti Shah developed this tagline and explains the significance behind the words, below.

As the global future moves towards long-term ecological damage, we are starting to experience and understand the effects these damages and changes have on the way we live our everyday lives. To fight this race against time and this battle against our own lifestyles, we need leaders to guide communities in the right direction and to keep the hope and will to survive ablaze. These leaders will be required to bridge the gap that exists between what scientists figure and what political leaders can communicate to society; people who know how to interpret the science along with translating it in a way that every class and section of society can benefit from that knowledge.

The Graduate Program of Environmental Policy and Management (EPM) offered by the University of California, Davis, is a STEM program that fosters students professional goals by providing them with the tools and means to connect their field of work to climate change management. With climate mitigation and adaptation being the forerunner strategies of climate action, courses offered by EPM focus on the science behind these strategies coupled with an intensive understanding of the way in which local, national, and global legal systems work. Through all that I, as a first-year graduate student of EPM, have learned through my work and research, can say that climate scientists are working hard to find solutions to create a resilient future but there is a dearth of people who can actually implement the same.

And this is what a graduate course like EPM can do. This program is structured in a way in which the first entire year, students study a wide range of subjects from climate science and environmental law, to their choice of electives. During the second year, they further their learning, focus on their specialization and work with other students from diverse backgrounds to solve an array of environmental problems through the tools of effective communication and policymaking. On top of that, they are mentored and guided by professors who have been working in the field of climate sciences and solutions for years and are experts in their areas, academically and/or professionally. This is why, the tagline, “Building scientific leaders for a resilient future” fits perfectly for such an advanced and visionary program of the future.