Contact Information
Sustainability Institute
Land and Water Research Building
University Park, PA 16802
814-865-7488
sustainability@psu.edu
Dr. Peter Buck
peterbuck@psu.edu
(814) 865-7445
Lydia Vandenbergh
lydia@psu.edu
(814) 863-4893
Interns
Lara Fowler
Chief Sustainability Officer (Interim); Director, Sustainability Institute (Interim); Senior Lecturer, Penn State Law
Lara Fowler is the Interim Chief Sustainability Officer of Penn State University and Interim Director of the Sustainability Institute, as well as a Senior Lecturer in Penn State Law and Affiliate Faculty of the Penn State School of International Affairs. Prior to this she served as an Assistant Director of the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment (IEE).
Lara is an attorney and mediator who focuses on environmental, energy, and natural resource law, with a specific focus on water related issues. Her work at Penn State Law and IEE has focused on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay, and energy. She teaches courses on water law; energy; negotiation and dispute resolution design; and mediation of environmental and public conflicts.
Fowler is a juror for the Stockholm International Water Institute’s Junior Water Prize, a global competition for students ages 15 to 20 who have developed research projects that can help address major water challenges. During the 2019-20 academic year, she was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden, where her research focused on finding and understanding examples of where cooperation over managing water resources — both water quality and quantity — have played out.
Prior to joining Penn State, Lara was an attorney at Gordon Thomas Honeywell LLP in Seattle, Washington, where she focused on mediation and dispute resolution of complex natural resource issues, as well as representing clients facing regulatory hurdles in the environmental and energy fields. She has worked on issues such as who is entitled to store groundwater in the greater Los Angeles area; flooding issues in the Chehalis Basin, Washington State’s second largest river basin; and energy issues in the Pacific Northwest. Before pursuing a legal career, she was a senior water resources coordinator with the Oregon Water Resources Department. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in Asian studies from Dartmouth College while accomplishing a senior fellowship program on Native American water rights and earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Washington School of Law with a focus on environmental mediation.
Lydia Vanderbergh
Associate Director of Employee Engagement and Education
Lydia Vandenbergh’s mission for the Sustainability Institute is to engage employees in weaving sustainability into all of their decisions and practices. The present approach is through two programs. The Green Teams program supports faculty and staff who volunteer to find new positive ways to make their operations and programs forge a better future for our customers and the University. The second program, Green Paws, is a green office certification program, a tool that anyone at the University can use to learn resource efficient office practices. For the over one hundred Penn State Green Teams, Lydia and her interns create monthly informative newsletters, organize fun learning sessions, and other resources to make it easy for them to build leadership capability and engage others.
Lydia earned her MA in Energy and Environmental Policy from George Washington University and a BA in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Doug Goodstein
Associate Director for Student Engagement
Doug’s role within the Sustainability Institute is to coordinate with internal and external campus partners to create a robust student-centered co-curricular experience with on and off-campus sustainability projects. These experiences will provide meaningful engagements at all institutional levels to promote sustainability, construct sustainable behaviors and advance pro-environmental literacy.
Doug serves as the Sustainability Institute’s primary contact with Student Affairs, working closely with Student Activities, Residence Life, Educational Equity, Global Programs, the Office of Physical Plant, and Housing and Food Services.
As a sustainability focused professional his mission is to ensure that every student understands how social and environmental issues manifest themselves and have the tools to create a more socially just and verdant future.
Doug holds an undergraduate degree in Biology from Franklin Pierce College, a Master’s of Education specializing in Higher Education Administration from Springfield College, and a second Master’s in Sustainability Management from Harvard University. He is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. from Penn State University.
Peter Buck
Academic Programs Manager
Peter Buck manages academic programming for Penn State’s Sustainability Institute. He connects and catalyzes faculty, staff, students, and the public to imaginatively integrate sustainability into academics, outreach, operations, and research. He supports programming with competencies-based reviews and revision for majors, minors, courses, and units, guest-teaching, and faculty development, as well as strategic support for emerging initiatives that cross traditional academic and disciplinary boundaries. Over the last two years these collaborations have included high-impact collaborations with the Palmer Art Museum on the Plastic Entanglements exhibition, the Colleges of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Engineering to establish an applied initiative for utility-scale grid-tied solar projects, audits and course development with the College of Nursing, and Penn State’s Research Experience for Undergraduates in partnership with the Project Drawdown. In the coming years, he will continue collaborations, including working on systemic policy changes through Penn State’s Faculty Senate. Peter and his interns also research, catalyze, and support local schooling for sustainability, democratic decision-making in the Anthropocene on campus and in the community, and environmental justice.
Buck has also taught and communicated extensively on sustainability and life in the Anthropocene. From 2016 to 2018, he taught Sustainability 200: Foundations of Leadership in Sustainability as well as a special topics course in Educational Theory and Policy where he holds an affiliate faculty position. He also communicates widely on sustainability, education, democracy, and music in popular and peer-reviewed press. He has appeared in The Washington Post, on the blog of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project, Democracy Works, Citizen’s Climate Radio, and was a speaker at TEDxPSU in 2018 with his talk “What’s the Future Hold? Ask a Metalhead.” His scholarship has most recently appeared in The Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. The International Journal of Ethics Education, Clinics of North America, and in Routledge’s Teaching Climate Change in the United States. In October 2015 his first book of poetry, Heartwood, was published by Mt. Nittany Press and works of poetry and fiction have recently appeared in The Watershed Journal and The Short Edition.
Leadership in professional, governmental, and civic organizations is important to Buck. Until June 2019, Peter served as the Vice Chair and Chair of the Ferguson Township Board of Supervisors, the only township in Pennsylvania to have signed the We Are Still In campaign. Currently, he chairs an intergovernmental solar power purchase agreement working group, serves on the Executive Committee of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium, on the National Council on Science and the Environment’s Advisory Board for Drawdown, and on the Board of the Penns Valley Conservation Association.
Peter holds a Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Policy and an M.A. and a B.A. in Music with a minor in Creative Writing. He lives in State College with his son Sacha.
Ilona Ballreich
Program Manager, SCC
As the program manager for the Sustainable Communities Collaborative, Ilona works closely with faculty, students, and community partners to ensure meaningful, experiential student projects focused on the sustainability needs of the community. Coordination involves strategic goal setting, planning, and ongoing communications between partners, culminating in a student-community exposition.
Ilona honed her skills in community engagement as the executive director of the non-profit Huntingdon County Arts Council, which she led to become one of the community’s major cultural hubs and assets. She has a BS in Industrial Technology from West Virginia State University and an MPS in Community and Economic Development from Penn State. She is also trained as a Blueprint Communities Facilitator through the FHLB and PA Downtown Center and Heart & Soul community development techniques. She is a successful grants writer and administrator, and serves on numerous community organizations and boards.
She resides with her husband and youngest of her four children in McAlevy’s Fort, in Huntingdon County.
Leslie Pillen
Associate Director, Farm and Food Systems
Leslie coordinates the cross-college planning process aimed at creating a sustainable food systems minor and a student-centered experiential learning farm at Penn State. She works with diverse stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff, community members, and alumni to envision and develop this new initiative. She is very excited about developing new opportunities for Penn Staters to learn about sustainable food and agriculture.
She received her MS in Rural Sociology from Penn State in December 2013. Her thesis assessed opportunities and barriers for beginning farmer land access through land link programs in the Northeast US. Her BS is in Horticulture from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Prior to graduate school, Leslie managed a beginning farmer training program and incubator farm at a non-profit in Lincoln, Nebraska. There, she developed farm production and business curricula for beginning farmers, managed a multi-farmer CSA, oversaw farm site development and maintenance, and grew the program through community partnerships and financial development.
Dr. Peter Boger
Assistant Director for Outreach and Engagement
Peter is responsible for helping the Sustainability Institute articulate and implement its vision for community engagement, integrating the university’s sustainability initiatives with the needs and goals of community and campus partners throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
He is the coordinator for SI’s public programming, including: the Public Health and Sustainability: Partners by Nature webinar series in partnership with PERC; the Green Gov Council Sustainability webinar series in partnership with the Pennsylvania Green Gov Council; the Colloquium on the Environment in partnership with the Institutes of Energy and the Environment; Pennsylvania’s Solve Climate by 2030 programming; public and campus tours at the Sustainability Experience Center; and Earth Day and Environmental Justice programming. He has also created and helps guide three different Intersections sustainability film series that have drawn more than 4,500 attendees over three years–working in partnership with WPSU, the Center for Global Workers’ Rights, and Penn State’s Water Council. Peter assists in carrying out sustainability engaged scholarship programs, such as Penn State’s City Semester Pittsburgh program, which allows students to apply sustainable practices and solutions with community organizations in the Pittsburgh area. Currently, he is helping to start up a new Sustainability Alumni Interest Group for Penn State’s Alumni Association. He also sits on the Faculty Senate Outreach Committee and the Outreach Division’s Sustainability Council.
Peter holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus on environmental media and history. He also earned an M.S. in Environmental Studies focused on environmental education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a B.A. in History focused on environmental history from Princeton University. He was a Doris Duke Conservation Fellow in 2006. Previously, he was director of Tales from Planet Earth, the largest free-admission environmental film festival in the U.S. He also has worked as a special assistant to New Jersey’s Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.
Dr. Nagwa Elnwishy
Visiting Sustainability Education Fellow
Dr. Nagwa Elnwishy is Herbert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) fellow at Penn State where she is a visiting Sustainability Education Fellow at the Sustainability Institute. She is a researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology of Postgraduate Research Studies at Suez Canal University (SCU) and the former Director of the Research Office at the University of Science and Technology in Zewail City, Egypt. She also teaches several courses in the Environmental Engineering department and in the ERASMUS climate change program. Her research experience focuses on human and environmental interaction.
At the Sustainability Institute, Nagwa co-plans and facilitate curricular development. She crafts and leads workshops with the University Park and Commonwealth Campus faculty to revise and draft new sustainability coursework. She is co-authoring a sustainability curricular development guide to assist unit-level train-the-trainer efforts and develop curricular modules for first-year seminars that can be implemented across disciplines. She is also assisting the SI’s affiliate faculty program with the specific intent of expanding demographic and disciplinary diversity. Finally, Elnwishy is assisting the ongoing efforts to enhance sustainability education and performance in Penn State’s laboratories.
Elnwishy holds a Ph.D. in marine biology from SCU and Lund University, Sweden, an MSc. in agriculture science from the United Nations University, and another MSc. in agriculture from SCU.
Dr. Meghan Hoskins
Director of Operations and Partnerships
Dr. Meghan Hoskins is working to make connections between Penn State Operations staff and Penn State faculty, staff and students who want to understand and improve the sustainability of Penn State operations. She is doing this through developing and facilitating Living Lab opportunities on our campuses and co-Chairing the Sustainability Operations Council (SOC).The SOC serves as a clearinghouse that was established for the purpose of bringing together various operational units to address the University’s environmental footprint through a systemic, holistic and collaborative effort. Meghan is also building partnerships with external entities to build mutually beneficial projects and relationships in sustainability.
Meghan earned her degrees in Engineering here at Penn State and worked for 10 years as a Research and Development Engineer at the Applied Research Laboratory. She is passionate about sustainability and is involved with the Ferguson Township Elementary School Environmental Club and coordinates community tree planting events with local schools.
Katie Chriest
Sustainable Food Systems Program Coordinator
Katie is based in Erie at Penn State Behrend. In connection with the Sustainability Institute and the Sustainable Food Systems Program at University Park, she works to build a community of practice across Commonwealth Campuses on food systems topics, with inspiration from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She also leads an energized team of interns at Penn State Behrend in managing a campus garden, operating an on-campus CSA, and partnering with other local entities who work to increase food access, literacy and justice throughout northwestern PA. She writes and edits for Edible Western New York, writes for Erie Reader, and she’s a musician, cyclist and compulsive gardener who loves traveling to foreign farms.
Sierra Keller
Communications Director
As the Sustainability Institute’s Communications Director, Sierra Keller enjoys the privilege of crafting an engaging multimedia outreach strategy that connects sustainability messaging to our many different constituencies. Since her graduation from The Pennsylvania State University, with a degree in Media Studies, Keller’s professional aspirations and personal interests have serendipitously collided through her work with local nonprofits and small businesses, having
previously worked for ClearWater Conservancy, where she continues to serve on the board, and the Centre Foundation. She has been a State College resident for 10 years where she lives with her husband, two rambunctious sons, and a menagerie of adopted animals. When she happens upon a rare moment of quiet, it is usually spent exploring local forestlands, pottering around the garden, or reading a good novel.
Krista Bailey
Sustainable Campus Strategist
Krista Bailey came to Penn State with experience in teaching sustainability and leading campus and community sustainability initiatives.
Throughout their career, they have put their skills in sustainability research, writing, training, project development, implementation, and evaluation into practice. As a faculty member in the Sustainability Studies program, Bailey developed and taught courses for both undergraduate and graduate students, including graduate and undergraduate courses in Sustainable Food Systems and Leadership Strategies. Their engaging teaching style resulted in a Fellowship that recognized their innovative classroom design, research, and active learning approaches.
In addition to work in higher ed, Bailey worked as the city of South Bend, Indiana’s first Sustainability Coordinator under Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Community engagement work has included co-hosted local PBS programs, serving on a city bicycling committee, and working with the Food Access Councils.
In addition to sustainability work in South Bend, Bailey’s experience in community development and environmental education includes directing the Elkhart EnviroCorps AmeriCorps program in Elkhart, Indiana. Under Bailey’s leadership, it developed and implemented scores of environmental education, restoration, and volunteer projects in partnership with local organizations and The Nature Conservancy.
As a lifelong learner, Bailey is working on an Ed.D. in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. Their interest in the nexus of health, wellness, and sustainability has focused their research on creating a holistic learning environment for all that will enable learners to put theory into practice.
Outside of work and school, Bailey teaches fitness classes, supports the Penn State Crew club, practices organic gardening, is an active bicyclist, and enjoys spending time with their two children and exploring and doing projects with their spouse.
Isabella Briseño
Employee Engagement Intern and Academic Programs Intern
Isabella Briseño is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Penn State University double majoring in Environmental Resource Management and Political Science. Bella is involved with advancing sustainability within Penn State as the Executive Director of Environmental Sustainability within the undergraduate student government and a member of the Student Sustainability Advisory Council. She has interned with the Sustainability Institute for two years as the Sustainability Education intern and Academic Programs intern. Bella has conducted undergraduate research using ArcGIS StoryMaps to showcase diverse perspectives for comprehensive ocean solutions. Outside of Penn State, Bella serves as the undergraduate representative on the Ocean Advisory Council under the Hispanic Access Foundation.
Julia Burton
Sustainable Communities Collaborative Intern
Julia is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Environmental Resource Management and minoring in Environmental Engineering, Watersheds and Water Resources, and Sustainability Leadership. This is her second year interning at the Sustainability Institute, specifically with the Sustainable Communities Collaborative program. She interned this past summer at Tree Pittsburgh, where she learned more about urban sustainability and how to protect and grow urban forests. She looks forward to the projects she will assist with this school year and hopes to be able to help get communities engaged in sustainability.
Halina Dingo
Communications Writing Intern
Halina Dingo is the Communications Writing Intern for the Sustainability Institute. She writes articles for Penn State News about sustainability initiatives, events, and news across the university. She also profiles researchers and faculty at Penn State who work within the sustainability sphere for the SDG Snapshot series and contributed to the 2020-2021 annual report, as well as other promotional materials.
In addition to interning at SI, Halina is also a fourth-year geoscience major, with minors in English and geophysics, and a certificate in GIS. She also interns as a Student Editor for a professor, editing and publishing climate change essays by students.
Molly Gulden
Showcase Speaker Series Intern
Molly Gulden has been the Student Sustainability Coordinator Intern, responsible for coordinating and facilitating the weekly Sustainability Showcase Series, alongside her colleague, Doug Goodstein. The Sustainability Showcase Series is a speaker series that highlights incredible people whose work is targeted toward addressing the Sustainable Development Goals.
Molly is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Earth Science and Policy, with a minor in Sustainability Leadership. She is a member of the Penn State EcoReps, a cohort of Student Sustainability Ambassadors who educate students living on campus about sustainable living. Molly is also the Family Relations chair for HEAL benefitting THON.
Sydney Hageman
Social Media Intern
Sydney is a second-year undergraduate student studying Marketing. Sydney enjoys engaging with students and sharing sustainability-related concepts through her work crafting short-form video content for the Sustainability Institute. She is passionate about connecting more of our audience with the Sustainability Institute’s mission so that they can become conscious stewards of our planet’s resources.
Outside of the Sustainability Institute at Penn State, Sydney serves as an Assistant Director of the Retail Division for the Penn State Marketing Association. Here, she assists other students in becoming well-rounded individuals who are well prepared to enter the workforce.
Sydney Hageman
Social Media Intern
Sydney is a second-year undergraduate student studying Marketing. Sydney enjoys engaging with students and sharing sustainability-related concepts through her work crafting short-form video content for the Sustainability Institute. She is passionate about connecting more of our audience with the Sustainability Institute’s mission so that they can become conscious stewards of our planet’s resources.
Outside of the Sustainability Institute at Penn State, Sydney serves as an Assistant Director of the Retail Division for the Penn State Marketing Association. Here, she assists other students in becoming well-rounded individuals who are well prepared to enter the workforce.
Sophia Marsh
Intersections Film Series Intern
Sophia (Sophie) Marsh is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Plant Sciences. She is also a proud member of EcoReps, a student organization of the Sustainability Institute, with a mission to serve as sustainability ambassadors who educate new students on how to live sustainably on campus. She hopes to use her degree, experience with the Sustainability Institute, and position with EcoReps to advance sustainable change throughout her life and career. She loves cats, plants, and living sustainably.
Since December 2021, Sophie has been the Community Engagement Intern for the Sustainability Institute, and is responsible for planning and managing the Intersections program–including film curation, promotions, and event management.
Kaylee Richards
Social Media Intern
Kaylee Richards is a social media intern at the Sustainability Institute at Penn State. A third-year at Penn State majoring in Telecommunications and Media Industries, Kaylee enjoys crafting and communicating the messages of the SI with its social media networks.
Linh Tran
Sustainability and Emissions Data Management Intern
Linh Tran is a Sustainability and Emissions Data Management Intern at the Sustainability Institute at Penn State. As a third-year student at Penn State majoring in Management Information Systems, Linh enjoys working on data collection and analysis for the SI’s Sustainability Dashboard. Outside of the Penn State Sustainability Institute, Linh holds the position of Vice President at The Daily Collegian. She is in charge of managing projects here and regularly holds biweekly staff meetings. Linh’s strength lies in her passion for data science and her proficiency in using Data Analytics software such as Power BI, and SQL to ensure data accuracy and adherence to professional standards.
