If you want to join the climate fight, the University of California is a great place to start. Our students do research and take classes with some of the world’s top climate experts. They get organized and push for important policy changes, like UC’s recent commitment to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions no later than 2045. And through work study programs like the Bonnie Reiss Leading on Climate Fellowship, students build their resumés for future careers in climate science, policy and activism.
At all 10 UC campuses, Reiss Fellows get financial support for doing research and outreach in support of the university’s climate goals. The program, named in honor of environmentalist and UC Regent Bonnie Reiss, taps students’ considerable talents and energies to help UC and the state tackle the climate challenge.
Over 400 students have come through the Reiss Fellowship since its founding a decade ago, and many of them have gone on to careers as climate leaders and problem-solvers. To celebrate the program’s tenth anniversary, we caught up with four alums to learn how they put their UC experience to work after graduation.
Directing State funding to communities battling extreme heat
Coming out of high school, Allie Larman figured the surest path to a career fighting climatechange would be through the hard sciences, even though they’d never really been her strong suit. So when she arrived for her first year at UC Davis, she was excited to discover a major focused on how to create policies that advanced climate justice and resilience.
In one of her first-year courses, Larman heard about the Reiss Fellowship and decided to apply. She got the job, with a remit to get other UC Davis students informed and involved the effort to electrify campus. A “tumultuous” first year during the pandemic notwithstanding, Larman stayed in the program until she graduated, tackling a new project each year.
For her senior year fellowship project, she compiled climate and demographic data to quantify the threats of extreme heat to communities around every UC campus. She also started applying for jobs. One role, with the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, asked for a writing sample. “I submitted my fellowship project, and they told me I was a good fit ‘to help start our new heat resilience grant program,” Larman says. “So, the job I’m in now is very linked to my fellowship, which is very cool.”
Larman’s job with the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation has her traveling around California, meeting with people and learning about how heat affects them, and what kind of help they need to stay safer and healthier as temperatures rise. Those conversations have informed a new grant program to help communities cover the costs of protecting themselves from extreme heat.
In addition to clearing a path to a job after graduation, Larman says one of the biggest benefits of her time as a Reiss Fellow was the chance to explore a bunch of different career paths and discover which of her strengths could put the biggest dent in the climate crisis. “I found out I like working at a local level, staying oriented on solutions that benefit people and improve equity, even if they don’t lead to big atmospheric carbon reductions,” she says. “That’s been my best way of staying positive and staying engaged in the fight.”
UC Davis alum Allie Larman
Helping the environmental movement walk the walk
Despite a full-time job and a busy freelance and volunteer schedule, Valeree Catangay finds time to draw or paint almost every day. A self-described outdoorsy kid and an artist for as long as she can remember, Catangay packs a notebook, some pens and some paints in her backpack and heads out to find and paint nature surrounding her home in Los Angeles.
“I’m feeling the changes in the weather, how the wind is blowing and the sun is drying my paint, and I try to incorporate that into what I’m putting down on my paper,” Catangay says. It’s part self-care, part activism: “Art amplifies my work as an environmentalist, to connect with and help educate people,” she says.
Catangay works on the sustainability team at Earthjustice, a national nonprofit that does pro bono legal work to protect communities and the environment. The organization aims to cut its carbon emissions by 60 percent in the coming decade, and it’s Catangay’s job to figure out where their emissions are coming from today, and what changes they need to make to reduce them.
The role draws a lot on the skills and vocabulary she started developing during her two years as a Reiss Fellow at UCLA from 2016-2018. Catangay teamed up with another fellow launch the Environmentalists of Color Collective, a student-run organization that aims to diversify the campus’s climate and environmental activist network and strengthen the school’s commitment to environmental justice. That project tested her project management and collaboration skills. The fellowship also offered a crash course in organizational climate strategy, from how carbon emissions are tracked and accounted to how to manage change at a large, complex organization.
She also started building a professional network that helps further her own climate activism to this day. When her team at Earthjustice was finalizing the organization’s climate goals this past year, Catangay called up sustainability staff at UC Office of the President. The university, after a decade of investing in carbon offsets, recently decided to switch tacks and focus on directly cutting its own emissions. “I brought that back to Earthjustice, and it helped back up the organization’s decision to not pursue offsets as an option,” she said. “UC has become a model for a lot of organizations in how to address their own climate contributions and goals.”
Thanks to her two years in the Reiss Fellowship, “I graduated with the language and the tools that I use to this day to communicate on climate change and understand how organizations of all kinds can reduce their emissions,” she says.
UCLA alum Valeree Catangay
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions and waste at UCLA
Christophe LaBelle traces his career to L.A.’s infamous smog. “As a kid I was frustrated that the air wasn’t as clean as it could be, but I also know by the time I was growing up there, it was so much better than it had been just a couple decades before,” LaBelle says. Thanks to laws like the Clean Air Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, today air pollution levels statewide are a fraction of what they were even 25 years ago.
Living through that history taught LaBelle a life lesson: “When I see something that could be better, I want to try to fix it,” he says. That spirit powered him through his bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkeley and his master’s in public policy from UCLA. He spent a year as a Reiss Fellow in grad school, as a member of UCLA’s sustainability team, which coordinates with every department on campus to hit systemwide climate and waste-reduction goals.
After graduation, LaBelle worked on climate and environmental issues for corporations in L.A. and the Bay Area. But when a job opened up on his old team at UCLA’s sustainability team two years ago, he jumped at the chance to get back to campus.
“Working at a university provides an ideal environment to test solutions and advance our knowledge, without just having to think about whether it serves the bottom line,” he says. And when that university is one of the nation’s leading public research institutions, the potential to solve real, big, complex problems feels almost limitless.
For LaBelle, working with experts across campus departments and academic disciplines to tackle one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced is a perfect fit. “I never assume a problem is unsolvable, that’s my general personality,” he says. “I’m always going to try to do something positive, rather than assume there’s nothing to be done.”
UCLA and UC Berkeley alum Christophe LaBelle
Using cutting-edge science to protect Californians from devastating fires
Katie Low got her first glimpse of her future career in high school, during a month-long math and science summer camp at UC Santa Cruz. She met professors whose research got them out into the redwoods and beaches around campus — “getting paid to go hike in cool places,” as she put it.
Low went to college at UC Berkeley, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in forestry. She spent a year in grad school as a Reiss Fellow, designing a mentorship program and curriculum for students who are from groups underrepresented in forestry.
By the time she graduated in 2023, she had a job waiting for her, as the coordinator of the new UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network. The network connects UC faculty, land management agencies, tribal leaders and everyday Californians with research, training and tools to improve the state’s fire resiliency. Low leads workshops on vegetation management, wildfire preparedness and property protection for communities across the state. She’s also strengthening California’s fire and forestry workforce through professional development and training for people just starting out in the field.
The job requires a lot of the skills she developed at UC Berkeley — both the fire ecology research she did to earn her degrees, and the experience with workforce development and outreach she gained through her fellowship.
“Fire has always been a part of our landscape and it always will be, but the climate change aspect is new, and we’re learning how to deal with those impacts on the go, every day,” she says. “By providing people with real solutions to the challenges they’re facing with fire, I think we’re really providing people with hope, that there are solutions, and that the future in California is not all doom and gloom.”
UC Berkeley alum Katie Low
