PitE student Andrew van Baal, who is also pursuing an accelerated master's degree at SEAS, is interested in understanding how systems function and how they can be changed for meaningful impact. His passion for systems thinking extends beyond his coursework into leadership and advocacy roles at U-M, including his co-presidency of the Student Sustainability Coalition.
Stephanie Smith, who is completing her senior year as an environmental studies major in the LSA Honors Program and her first year of an accelerated master's program at SEAS, is the winner of the 2025 Raoul Wallenberg Fellowship. She plans to use her award money to conduct a comparative case study on climate disaster communication efforts related to flooding in North Caroline and Nepal.
Although journalism, broadly, has faced many challenges and changes in recent years—economic hardship, decline in public trust and a shift from print to digital—environmental journalism, in particular, has a unique set of difficulties that make it hard for journalists to report on environmental injustices. To help address some of these challenges, three SEAS alumni have created a webinar series on equitable engagement, an extension of the work they did as part of their master’s project.