UDALL FOUNDATION

FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

Since 1997, the Udall Foundation has been awarding fellowships of up to $24,000 to doctoral candidates whose research concerns U.S. environmental public policy and/or environmental conflict resolution and who are entering their final year of writing the dissertation. Here are updates on a few former fellows.

Angela Bednarek, 2001 Udall Fellow

Angela Bednarek is currently an officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., where she works on the Lenfest Ocean Program, a marine research program aimed at reversing the decline of the global marine environment. She leads the policy outreach component of the work at Lenfest, which includes identifying opportunities to bring marine science to policy makers.

Prior to joining Pew in 2007, Angela was a foreign affairs officer and AAAS Diplomacy Fellow at the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Environmental Policy. While at the State Department, she was responsible for coordinating and negotiating U.S. positions on the Global Environmental Facility, OECD, the environmental impacts of World Bank projects, and a number of international chemicals agreements. In addition, she served as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Dams and Development Project Government Advisory Consultative Group. From 2002-2004, she was a Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York where she worked on sustainable development issues. She has also worked as a consultant for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Angela received her Ph.D. in biology in 2002 from the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Master's of Science in biology and aquatic ecology from the University of Louisville and her Bachelor of Science in biology and studio art from the University of Notre Dame.

Gabriel Cumming, 2006 Udall Fellow

Gabriel Cumming received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2007. Like his undergraduate and graduate research, Gabriel's postgraduate work has been motivated by the desire to effectively engage rural communities in natural resource management decision making. In 2007-2008, he served as the outreach coordinator for the Mountain Landscapes Initiative, a groundbreaking regional project aimed at addressing land use planning and development issues in the mountains of western North Carolina. The Initiative’s outreach strategy was modeled on the successful community engagement methodology that Gabriel, along with collaborator (and spouse) Carla Norwood, had developed during doctoral fieldwork in the region. This approach—which involves producing a locally-specific documentary film based on interviews with community members, and then presenting this documentary back to the community as a catalyst for dialogue—has proven effective in communities with little or no prior history of land use planning. The Mountain Landscapes Initiative outreach program, which culminated in May 2008, involved 500 participants representing seven counties and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. Input from all those participants guided the development of a regional growth management "tool box," a resource that included guidelines and best practices for local governments, developers, and individual landowners interested in undertaking environmentally and culturally appropriate development in the Southern Appalachian region.

Starting in Fall 2008, Gabriel, Carla, and new baby daughter Juniper headed to the other end of the state to work with communities on the North Carolina coast. Now a postdoctoral associate in Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, Gabriel is responsible for carrying out a community engagement process in rapidly growing coastal communities. This project provides a new context in which to test the participatory research methods he developed in the mountains. In his postdoctoral role, Gabriel has also designed and taught a course on documentary methods in natural resource management. Gabriel continues to explore new ways of simultaneously improving rural communities’ well-being and natural resource management outcomes: he is currently involved in launching a new project aimed at developing a sustainable, local food system in an impoverished region of the state.

For additional information about the Udall Fellowship, please contact Jane Curlin at 520.901.8500 or curlin@udall.gov.