‘A Glimmer of Hope’
The Climate Leaders Program empowers students to tackle climate change at the local and global levels.
Shannon Levkovitz was an aspiring architect who’d planned a traditional career. But after an experience that exposed her to interdisciplinary work on climate change, the senior from Charlotte, N.C., put herself on a different track.
“It opened a whole new world for me,” Levkovitz says. “It changed my path.” In 2023, Levkovitz was a scholar in the Climate Leaders Program, part of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology & Science (KIETS). Now, Levkovitz wants to explore material science and learn how to construct buildings from organic material.
The Climate Leaders Program began three years ago with the understanding that climate change won’t be solved by any one solution or discipline, says Amanda Mueller, program director. Each year, a cohort of 15 students — graduates and undergraduates — is paired with a respective professor in their field, to work on a research project. Students and faculty receive stipends to support their work, and students also attend a leadership academy and complete a three- to six-month internship.
In recent years, internships have involved land-use management in Lenoir County, N.C., lithium batteries at a national laboratory and making fabric fibers out of agricultural waste at Adidas.
“We want to develop future leaders to address climate change, both locally and globally,” Mueller says, adding that the program is set up to ensure students in different fields interact. “I’ll set up small groups — I might have an engineer, a social scientist, and an agricultural specialist,” she says. “They spur ideas among each other.”
Levkovitz says she was inspired by the other students. “Seeing that science could be intertwined with design to find solutions was so cool to me,” she says.
Mueller, who has studied ecosystems, says she knows the topic can seem unsolvable. But, she says, her work gives her “a glimmer of hope. … These students are passionate, they are emboldened. They are wonderful.”
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