For more information on the The Wyss Scholars Program, please return to the Wyss Scholars Page.

Sara Cawley
Environmental Policy and Planning

Sara Cawley is a second-year student at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE), pursuing an M.S. in Environmental Policy and Planning. Originally from northeastern Pennsylvania, she earned a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Political Science from Gettysburg College in 2011. While taking a summer course on the geography of Colorado’s Four Corners region, Sara began to develop an interest in Western land conservation issues, particularly those arising from the intersection of public and private land interests. Her senior thesis focused on identifying and contextualizing collaborative natural resource management efforts within the Intermountain West. Conducting fieldwork exposed Sara to the variety of ecological and socioeconomic landscapes existing across the West, as her travels took her all the way from ranchlands on the Arizona-Mexico border up to Glacier National Park in northern Montana.  

Sara next explored collaborative processes from an international perspective, after being awarded a Fulbright grant to study public involvement in the formation of the Danish national parks. Sara also spent time working on federal land and water policy issues while interning at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and gained practical experience in landscape management and environmental education while serving as a member of AmeriCorps Cape Cod.

Julia Elkin
Environmental Policy and Planning & Conservation Ecology

Julia Elkin is a second-year M.S. candidate in Environmental Policy and Conservation Ecology at University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment. Prior to arriving in Michigan, she worked five years designing and leading outdoor education programs with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center where her work focused on engaging schools and public audiences with watershed science.  Through these organizations, she also worked on coastal restoration projects with watermen and state agencies throughout the Chesapeake Bay.

 

These experiences fueled Julia’s interest in public-private initiatives for sustainable land management, leading to her decision to leave teaching and pursue a career focused on the collaborative dimensions of natural resource management.  She is particularly interested in western lands conservation and how public land advocates can engage with private land owners on landscape scale ecological conservation opportunities along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, areas of the country she lived in as a child and has continued loving to explore as an adult.

 

As a Wyss Scholar, Julia interned with The Wilderness Society out of their Northern Rockies Office where she interviewed diverse stakeholders and subsequently compiled a report on the state of community based collaboratives working on National Forest management in Montana. The published report, widely circulated among regional stakeholders and state decision makers, can be found at tws.org