University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) master’s student Hira Ahmad (MS ’24) came to graduate school looking for a program that would complement and expand her undergraduate degree. Ahmad graduated from Depauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana, where she studied biology. “Even though I was a biology major, I still took classes in political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology and English literature,” Ahmad said. 

Ahmad chose SEAS because of its emphasis on the intersection between ecology and environmental justice. “I didn’t want to study conservation without a justice orientation because that felt really meaningless to me,” she explained. “Ecosystem science and management (ESM) was a way for me to build on my biology background, and environmental justice (EJ) guided my work.”

At SEAS, EAS 529: Indigenous Sustainability and Environmental Justice and EAS 594: Indigenous Peoples, Rights and EJ with SEAS Professor Kyle Whyte and Malu Castro were two courses that stood out to Ahmad. Both expanded how she understood and learned about biology and ESM through an Indigenous and EJ lens. Ahmad also notes that SEAS Lecturer shakara tyler’s class, EAS 501.009: Black Agrarian Cooperatives, was equally impactful and interesting to her. Her favorite part of being a SEAS student, though, was “the friends and lasting connections that I built during my time here and the supportive faculty who guided me through.” 

A personal achievement for Ahmad was recently being awarded the 2024 Emerging Leader Award from The River Network, a national organization of water professionals in the United States. Awardees are typically early-career professionals interested in water management and diversity, equity and inequality (DEI) in water. 

“Winning this award opened up a collaborative opportunity for myself and the other students on my capstone team with the River Network,” said Ahmad, who learned about the award through work she was doing for her capstone project. One of the people Ahmad and her team interviewed for the project was Amy Boal, senior director for brand and communications at the River Network. Boal nominated Ahmad for the award and encouraged her to see the application through. 

“I used [my capstone team’s] work and my personal interests as a nexus for the application,” explained Ahmad. She acknowledged her team’s contribution to the award, explaining that, “it is difficult to recognize my own work and accomplishments without understanding all that the project entails and the contributions of my teammates.” 

Ahmad’s capstone project, “Media with Impact: Building a Community-Driven Model for Environmental Justice Coverage in the Great Lakes Region,” aims to evaluate the current relationships between EJ communities and understand how media can better service their information needs. The capstone team helped to develop key recommendations for media organizations and philanthropic foundations to advance equitable and community-based environmental journalism in order to uplift the narratives of frontline environmental justice communities and bring about civic change. The team has been developing a toolkit for media and communications teams or individuals to use when engaging with EJ-affected communities. Ahmad’s teammates are fellow SEAS students Kausthubh Sumanth, Francesca Levethan, Hannah Rieders and Madeline Rieders. 

“This [project] has been a really important growing experience in learning what areas I want to focus on in my career,” Ahmad said. “I’ll be working at the intersection between community engagement and scientific research, and I want to make sure we have research and tools that are usable by communities and serve their needs. This was kind of the main point of my capstone project and is the core of what I will be doing going forward.” 

In June, Ahmad will be starting a position as an Oak Ridge Institute Fellow at the Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago. She will be working in community engagement on the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.  

As Ahmad prepares to graduate from SEAS, she thinks back to her first days as a graduate student and advises incoming students to “slow down and soak in everything you can from your peers. It can be really easy to get lost in the chaos of grad school classes and assignments, but you’ll learn so much from your peers inside and outside the classroom if you take the time to listen.”