Class News

Class of '64 Summer Fellowships for 2005

The Class of 1964 Summer Fellowship supports summer travel and fieldwork by Yale juniors and seniors who have an interest in the environment. The Class of 1964 Summer Fellowship Committee is co-chaired by Frank Basler and Mike Price.

Following in the footsteps of our 2004 Fellows, four Summer Fellows for 2005 have been named. Their background and accomplishments are described below. Here's news:

Xizhou Zhou, '05, who worked with EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute Center for Transport and the Environment on its various Asia projects, sent us his Internship Report.
Dawn Lippert, '06: Even though a tropical storm ruined her research project on Sea Turtle predation in Vieques, Puerto Rico, she had many good learnings.

Dawn Lippert '06

In her junior year Dawn was co-captain of the Yale Women's soccer team and co-founder of STEP (Student Task Force for Environmental Policy), for which she and two partners managed a $38,000 grant they wrote and for which they supervised 25 paid classmates who do environmental education and collect recyclables. Her leadership experience/abilities leap off the printed page and are even more striking when you talk with her.

This environmental studies major received $1000 from our Summer Fellowship fund to help her study ways of protecting four different species of turtle hatchlings on the beaches of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. This summer she'll be counting mongoose tracks and hatchling survival rates to determine the best way to protect both eggs and hatchlings from the influences of both humans and mongooses.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials with whom she'll be working are excited about her research. They don't have the person power to do this kind of exacting work. Stay tuned in October for a summary of her results and the impact of this experience on Dawn herself.

Laura Schewel '06

Laura will use $1000 from our class to fund a trip to the Pangani Basin in Tanzania. The basin consists of two lakes connected by a river dividing Tanzania and Kenya. Laura's project is fascinating and very creative! After conducting interviews about water issues and past success in finding ways of sharing water, she will summarize her findings about trends among water users in the basin. Then, at the end of her summer, she'll convene and conduct a workshop to report her findings and to further cooperation among the various parties.

She'll be working with GTZ, the German equivalent of USAID in Tanzania (a former German colony), and Pamoja, a Tanzanian NGO whose name means "together." The Kenya Coast Development Authority and three other groups have also agreed to help her and to attend the workshop, which will be part of Pamoja and GTZ's "Trans-Boundary Water Dialogue Project." The ultimate goal is to create one organization out of many of the various groups involved

Laura originally chose a Literature major, and ended up taking an Environmental Engineering course to fulfill a requirement. (It was the only science course that fit her schedule.) To her surprise, she found herself enjoying those calculations and problem sets, so she declared a double major in environmental engineering. As she delved deeper, she kept returning to water. She believes that environmental issues will dominate her political and scientific generation and that water will soon dominate environment issues. "I want to be a part of my generation, my time," she writes. "So I set out to find work with water."

Conflicts over water are on the rise. Stay tuned to find out how Laura is able to help forge cooperation in parts of Tanzania and Kenya.

Teresa Tapia '06

Will this seasoned environment activist choose a "calmer" lifestyle as an academic? Perhaps Teresa's summer in Germany will help her decide. Co-chair of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, she loved her course in Environmental Politics and Law last semester with Professor Wargo.

He helped her construct a project as an intern with him and two German colleagues at Environmental Forecast and Analysis (EEFA), in Muenster. She will conduct preliminary research in New Haven on emissions trading and renewable energy policies and learn an analytical tool for asking "what if" questions and forecasting consequences of different policy options. In Muenster she'll work with Professor Stroebele at the University of Muenster, gaining experience in energy and environment economic analysis. She'll both be collecting information, traveling with her EEFA mentors, and conducting economic analyses of that data

Teresa spent part of last summer in Berlin studying German. By the end of this summer she hopes to be able to participate fluently in environmental, energy, and economic conversations in German.

A student on full scholarship, Theresa thanks the Class for the $1500 we are providing and says it was very important in making this summer possible for her.

Xizhou Zhou, '05

Urbane, articulate and outgoing, Xizhou has an impressive commitment to a career in which he can help stem his native China's growing environmental deterioration. He plans to spend next year getting his Master of Environmental Management in a Joint Bachelor's/Master's program at the FES school. Next steps are less clear ― options include joining an NGO working in or on behalf of China and studying law there, and working as an industrial environmental manager.

We have contributed $500 to help fund an internship in Washington, DC, with WRI, the World Resources Institute. Xizhou was chosen by WRI as this year's Cameron Speth Fellow. The Cameron Speth Fund at WRI helps to support a summer intern and was established by classmate Gus Speth two years ago from proceeds of his Blue Planet Prize.

Working in WRI's Center for Transport and the Environment, or EMBARQ, Xizhou will analyze data related to Shanghai and Mexico City's transportation policies and help prepare for one or more conferences among transportation officials and academics from both cities.

Xizhou chose this internship over a chance to do research on multinational corporations' industrial ecology efforts in China. He decided a summer in Washington would put him in touch with more sustainable energy transportation professionals, contacts that will be useful in his future work. Xizhou's senior essay on industrial environmental management in China has been circulated among staff members in EPA's international division to help shape environmental policies in China, and he has been invited to participate at the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in DC over the summer.