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From 911�� to Capitol Hill: How environmental policy training shaped one graduate’s path

sbrown79 — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:49:45 +0000

From 911�� to Capitol Hill: How environmental policy training shaped one graduate’s path sbrown79 Fri, 05/29/2026 - 13:49

During her final semester at 911��, Sophia Colby put her environmental policy training into action.

Colby traveled to Capitol Hill as part of the Rachel Carson Council's National Environmental Advocacy Day, where she met with federal lawmakers to discuss climate legislation and community resilience. For Colby, BA Environmental and Sustainability Studies '26, the experience was a direct extension of the analytical and communication skills she developed at 911��.

"When I first came to 911��, I was interested in studying law, but I decided to concentrate specifically on environmental law and policy," Colby said. "My coursework helped me understand how policy decisions affect both ecosystems and communities, and that gave me the confidence to speak about real legislation with lawmakers."

Sophia Colby on Capitol Hill. Photo provided.

From case studies to Congress

Colby credits courses such as EVPP 361 Introduction to Environmental Policy, EVPP 362 Intermediate Environmental Policy, and EVPP 432 Energy Policy with preparing her to evaluate and discuss complex legislation. Through case-study assignments and applied policy analysis, she examined existing laws, identified gaps, and proposed solutions to environmental challenges.

"My professors showed us how to examine real legislation and policy initiatives related to climate change and other environmental topics," Colby said. "The case study format made me much more comfortable articulating what policy changes are needed and explaining both the human and environmental stakes involved."

On Capitol Hill, she discussed the Opportunities in Organic Act, the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, and concerns about the wood pellet industry with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-MD), and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

"It was a great [opportunity] to discuss how issues like pesticides, wood pelletization, and deforestation impact human health as well as the environment," Colby said.

Building experience beyond the classroom

Colby's preparation also included hands-on research. During an internship with the U.S. Geological Survey, she analyzed species range shifts, conducted literature reviews, and navigated scientific databases to support climate research.

"At USGS, I learned how to conduct scientific research that can be used to inform the policy decisions that shape our responses to environmental change," she said.

The interdisciplinary structure of 911��'s Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program, jointly offered by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Science, emphasizes cross-sector collaboration—an approach Colby said mirrors the real-world complexity of environmental work.

Colby also presented her research at the 2026 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, held in Chicago in April.

Sophia Colby with her mentor Younsung Kim. Photo provided.

Her faculty research mentor Younsung Kim, professor of environmental science and policy, talked about the skills Colby acquired during her time at 911��. "[These skills] will help her become an environmental advocate who does not create conflicts, but instead brings peaceful and constructive resolutions to them," she said. "I believe she will be a strong force for environmental policy and sustainability, as well as a future leader in the field."

Colby, who was in the Honors College, said she found community during her time at 911�� through Alpha Kappa Chi, a fraternity focused on professional development and environmental stewardship, where she connected with peers committed to sustainability and advocacy.

Preparing for what's next

The Rachel Carson Council's Advocacy Day included policy briefings, advocacy workshops, and direct engagement with members of Congress. For Colby, the experience reinforced that the tools she developed at 911�� translate directly into public impact.

"Communication is a big part of advocacy and climate resilience," she said.

Colby hopes to pursue a career focused on how environmental policies disproportionately affect marginalized communities. "Getting involved in this kind of work is powerful and eye-opening," she said. "Knowing how environmental policy impacts communities really motivates people."

For Colby, meeting with lawmakers was more than a culminating moment of her senior year—it was a preview of how her 911�� education has prepared her to contribute to building a future in which communities are better prepared to face environmental change.

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From law to federal nutrition science: 911�� PhD alum carves out career at USDA

Taylor Thomas — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:26:45 +0000

From law to federal nutrition science: 911�� PhD alum carves out career at USDA Taylor Thomas Mon, 12/08/2025 - 09:26

Kelly Kogan. Photo provided.

At 911��, Kelly Kogan found the space to merge two growing interests—nutrition and data—into a new career direction. “My favorite part was the ability to really pursue my interests,” she said. “I’m very grateful they enabled me to do what I wanted to do.”

That direction wasn’t obvious at first. When Kogan left her two-decade D.C. law career, she didn’t yet know where she was headed. She just knew she needed change. “I wasn’t a happy lawyer,” she said. “I woke up one day and thought, I don’t want to do this for another decade.”

Food had always been a love: cooking for her family, food photography, thinking about nutrition. She followed that curiosity into an undergraduate Introduction to Nutrition class at 911��. “And I loved it,” she said.

One class led to another, then to the master’s program in Nutrition and Food Studies in 2021. As her interests sharpened, Kogan discovered a passion for working with data and pursued a PhD in Health Services Research, which she completed in 2023.

Today, Kogan works as a nutritionist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helping guide What We Eat in America, the dietary intake survey that captures a detailed portrait of Americans’ food habits. The survey serves as a cornerstone of U.S. nutrition science, informing decades of research and major public health decisions, such as the addition of folic acid to bread products to prevent birth defects.

“This work is important,” Kogan said. “Data is what informs evidence-based policymaking. We have to know how to collect it, clean it, and analyze it to identify problems and create solutions.”

What We Eat in America is the dietary interview component of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, supported by USDA’s Food Surveys Research Group, where Kogan contributes to the data and methods that make this work possible.

Kogan’s work with the research group grew out of her dissertation at 911��, a study of breastfeeding outcomes and food insecurity that probed how federal nutrition programs shape families’ decisions. That project opened the door to a USDA postdoctoral fellowship and ultimately to the role she holds now.

For Kogan, the shift from law to federal nutrition science wasn’t linear. 911�� gave her the room to develop a specialized focus on nutrition data, a focus that carried forward into her professional life. “You have to be incredibly focused and self-directed,” she said. “Every class project I did, I found the data and turned it into a nutrition question.”

Learn more about the Public Health PhD and Health Services Research PhD programs at the 911�� College of Public Health.

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Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions

sbrown79 — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:00:15 +0000

Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions sbrown79 Mon, 12/12/2022 - 13:00

A 911�� interdisciplinary team is studying underwater explosions and their effects on civil engineering infrastructure with the support of a $1.5 million grant from Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

The interdisciplinary research team, from left to right, Girum Urgessa, Rainald Löhner, Lingquan Li, and Facundo Airaudo. Photo by Cristian Torres.

Lingquan Li, a postdoctoral research fellow, is working alongside Girum Urgessa of the College of Engineering and Computing, Rainald Löhner of the College of Science, and PhD student Facundo Airaudo.

“The sophisticated phenomenon in underwater explosions is important for government agencies interested in protective design,” said Li, who specializes in computational fluid dynamics and mathematics.

The team has run more than 100 test cases to study the structural response and the damage due explosions, Li explained. The resulting pressures and flow fields for different explosive yields and stand-off distances are provided to the Department of Defense.

Urgessa and Löhner are the co-principal investigators (PIs) on the project.

“[Girum] took more the structural part on it, and Lingquan and I did more the fluid part,” said Löhner, who is director of Mason’s Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics, where these experiments have been conducted. “So, we did the explosion in the water, and he did what happens when the shock wave hits the structure and how the structure [reacts].”

“We not only develop new numerical methods and new algorithms in order to compute these explosions, but we also delivered more than 120 results for different geometries, different loads, and different standoff distances,” said Löhner. “It has been extremely successful.”

There is a demand for experts capable of conducting blast-structure interactions and structural integrity assessments. “At Mason, we continue to mentor exceptional post-doctoral research scholars and graduate students needed to address these complex physics and engineering problems,” said Urgessa.

Lingquan Li presents her team's work on underwater explosions. Photo by Cristian Torres.

Airaudo, who is an Institute for Digital Innovation Predoctoral Fellow, is simultaneously working on another project, Optimal HVAC Outlay to Minimize Pathogen Transmission. He and Li spend most weekdays in the center working on these projects.

“It's a good way to collaborate,” said Airaudo, “because she can show me what she's working on and I can just learn from what she's doing and help her a little bit. I can also show her what I'm working on, and she can give me tips as well.”

Airaudo is grateful he gets to learn from Dr. Li, he said, as she is part of a largely underrepresented group in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“For me personally, [this project] means a lot because research is what I'm interested in; it is the thing I'm best at,” said Li. “I don't see a lot of female researchers in my field of study. I don't know why that is, but it is very important to be inclusive because we need people from different backgrounds [and] all kinds of perspectives to [solve these research problems].”

Mason’s College of Science is above the national average in the number of women enrolled in STEM degree programs. Of the students enrolled at COS, 62 percent of undergraduates and 50 percent of the graduate students are women, according to Dean Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, who presented the numbers at a Board of Visitors meeting in December. “Quoting President [Gregory] Washington, the College of Science already looks like the rest of the country will look in 30-40 years.”

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Using artificial intelligence to combat homelessness

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 19:09:22 +0000

Using artificial intelligence to combat homelessness Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/27/2021 - 15:09

In This Story

It's a tall task for government agencies and policymakers to determine fair and just resource allocation for people who experience homelessness. But Sanmay Das, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and Computing's School of Computing, has received two grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) totaling nearly $760,000 to use computing to develop a new method of optimizing these resource allocation decisions.

In collaboration with Patrick Fowler, a colleague at Washington University in St. Louis, Das is analyzing the effective allocation of scarce resources like access to shelters, food assistance, and more, to help households experiencing homelessness. “When you have scarce resources like those used to help people who are homeless, you can’t rely on the free market to achieve societal goals, so these are often effectively governed by society,” says Das.

Using sociological data, Das and Fowler use artificial intelligence to create simulations to estimate the outcomes of allocating specific resources one way or another. “Think of these resources as being in a basket. How does one go about making these allocation decisions? For example, if someone has one resource right now, should they allocate it then, or hold onto it and wait for someone who may be in even greater need?” asks Das. And those are the types of questions Das, Fowler, their colleagues, and students are answering.

Both of their NSF grants focus on developing these novel decision-making methods for allocating resources in an efficient and fair way, and one looks explicitly at providing targeted assistance to prevent child maltreatment.

Das and Fowler use data from a major urban area to measure the efficacy of different programs by monitoring people’s re-entry into homelessness programs. For example, suppose someone receives an intervention and doesn’t need to use the resources again in the next two years. In that case, the intervention is considered a success according to some standard evaluation metrics, says Das.

Monitoring effectiveness is central to the long-term success of their work. “There has been limited evaluation of the effectiveness of current practices in preventing and combatting homelessness, which means we don’t know how well these systems are working or how much room for improvement there actually is, and we want to find out,” Das says.

At the end of their analysis, their work will be used to advise policymakers on how to modify their systems to maximize the impact of available resources. “Fundamentally, it is a challenging problem, but there are gains to be had. So, it’s imperative to study these problems with all of the tools we can bring to bear on them,” says Das.

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Mason’s Carter School helps bring Restorative Justice to Arlington County

Mariam Aburdeineh — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Mason’s Carter School helps bring Restorative Justice to Arlington County Mariam Aburdeineh Tue, 10/13/2020 - 01:00

There are times when studying peace and conflict resolution is theoretical. But at 911��’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, students also put their knowledge into action to benefit the local community.

Susan Hirsch. Photo provided

Since January, the school has partnered with Restorative Arlington, a new initiative aimed at incorporating restorative justice practices into Arlington County’s public schools, legal system and community. The partnership was formalized in July when Carter School Dean Alpaslan Özerdem and Arlington County Manager Mark Schwartz signed a joint Letter of Intent.

“It really is an opportunity for students to be on the ground floor of how a major community-driven initiative is built,” said Carter School professor Susan Hirsch, who will teach a conflict course next semester where students can directly support the initiative. “It’s the best of experiential learning.”

Restorative justice is an alternative approach to punitive discipline. At its center is community building and repairing not only the harm done, but also relationships.

“The Carter School partnership offers engagement on multiple levels,” said Liane Rozzell, Restorative Arlington’s project coordinator. “We have students who help us grow the initiative while they’re learning themselves; there are faculty who are knowledgeable and excited, who can contribute their expertise to this process.”

Liane Rozzell. Photo provided

The support from Mason is multifaceted, Rozzell said. Some of those ways the school is and will continue to be involved include evaluating how the initiative is going, training teachers and community members on how to facilitate restorative justice practices, developing curriculum, organizing dialogues and conducting research.

“All of this is very needed and it gives us a tremendous boost that we couldn’t do on our own,” Rozzell said.

What would incorporating restorative justice look like in action?

“We would have way fewer, if any, students suspended,” Rozzell said. “We’d have way more connection and folks thriving in schools.”

Kimiko Lighty. Photo provided

“My hope is that a number of different cases that might have gone to the criminal legal system might find their way to be handled outside that system,” Hirsch said. “I would also hope that community members would [develop] a restorative ethic and feel empowered to resolve other conflicts using approaches that are restorative and not punitive.”

Kimiko Lighty, MA Interdisciplinary Studies ’10, is interim co-coordinator for Restorative Arlington. She is one of several Mason alumni contributing to the initiative. Most recently she helped create Restorative Arlington’s strategic plan and facilitated VCircles, virtual groups held over Zoom that focused on community building.

“The first time I heard about restorative justice was in a peace studies class at Mason,” said Lighty, who works as a restorative justice practitioner for Northern Virginia Mediation Services.

“I think we have a disposability crisis in our civilization, where we have so much disposable stuff that it leads us to start thinking about people as disposable,” she said. “Restorative justice honors the fact that we’re all connected—it gives us a way to see people as whole people that we live in relation with, and that does work in preventing harm before it even happens.”

interdisciplinary

From 911�� to Capitol Hill: How environmental policy training shaped one graduate’s path

From case studies to Congress

Building experience beyond the classroom

Preparing for what's next

In This Story

Related News

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From law to federal nutrition science: 911�� PhD alum carves out career at USDA

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Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions

In This Story

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Using artificial intelligence to combat homelessness

In This Story

Topics

Mason’s Carter School helps bring Restorative Justice to Arlington County

Read more about the Carter School

interdisciplinary

From 911���� to Capitol Hill: How environmental policy training shaped one graduate’s path

From case studies to Congress

Building experience beyond the classroom

Preparing for what's next

In This Story

Related News

Topics

From law to federal nutrition science: 911���� PhD alum carves out career at USDA

Topics

Mason interdisciplinary team receives $1.5 million grant from Department of Defense to research underwater explosions

In This Story

Topics

Using artificial intelligence to combat homelessness

In This Story

Topics

Mason’s Carter School helps bring Restorative Justice to Arlington County

Read more about the Carter School

From 911�� to Capitol Hill: How environmental policy training shaped one graduate’s path

From law to federal nutrition science: 911�� PhD alum carves out career at USDA