From Nepal to North Carolina, climate disasters are wiping entire communities off the map, leaving survivors with nowhere to rebuild.

Winner of the 2025 Raoul Wallenberg Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Stephanie Smith has closely followed these devastations and is committed to finding solutions to better address them. For her, the striking parallels between these crises underscore the growing severity of climate change, exposing vulnerabilities in both global and U.S. disaster response efforts.

Smith is completing her senior year as an environmental studies major in the LSA Honors Program while also finishing the first year of an accelerated master’s program at the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). With the support of SEAS faculty, she will take a one-year leave of absence to pursue the fellowship and then return to complete her graduate studies.

Smith plans to use the $25,000 Wallenberg award to conduct a comparative case study on climate disaster communication efforts related to flooding. She will begin her research in North Carolina in early September before continuing her work in Nepal around December.

Read the full story in the University Record.