Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

Leslie is an ecologist, educator, and naturalist studying wild pollinators in Vermont. Before moving to Vermont, Leslie studied wild pollinators in Costa Rican forests and coffee farms, Minnesota prairies, and the urban wilds of Boston. She is also a Vermont Master Naturalist and serves on the Vermont Pollinator Working Group steering committee.

Yadira Silva Rios is a first generation doctoral student, youngest daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, born and raised on Staten Island, NY. Growing up fishing and clamming, gardening, and cooking up feasts for her family drew her to a career in food. With her PhD, she is exploring how sustainable food futures are defined within environmental sciences, and how the Latin American and diaspora experience may be misrepresented within it. She hopes to encourage the use of community-led definitions of sustainable food futures.

Destiny Dynella Treloar is a proud first-generation Nicaragüense woman from Miami. She is fiercely committed to advocating for the well-being of Latine communities, addressing the structural drivers of nutritional insecurity, and developing meaningful solutions to modulate environmental health disparities in her home communities. Destiny is a PhD candidate at the Yale School of Environment.

Jackson is a master’s in environmental management candidate specializing in ecosystem conservation and management at the Yale School of the Environment. Jackson is particularly interested in private lands conservation, prairie plants, commodity markets, land ownership, ecological restoration, and lots more.