“We need Joy as we need air. We need Love as we need water. We need each other as we need the earth we share.”

Maya Angelou

The mission of the Environment and Sustainability Studies (ENV) Program is to prepare students to create just and sustainable futures. By leveraging the experiential learning of liberal arts education and coupling it with our vibrant professional schools, we teach students how to think across disciplinary boundaries to address environmental challenges and to act within their communities for environmental justice. We ready students to be bold and ethical leaders who respond to environmental issues using socio-environmental synthesis for evidence-based, creative, and principled action.

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Upcoming Events

Check out upcoming program-related events at Wake Forest below.

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News

  • ENV professor to collaborate on NASA-funded study of carbon storage in forests
    Dr. Ovidiu Csillik, assistant professor in remote sensing in the Environmental Program, will serve as a co-investigator on a new $1 million NASA-funded project to get a more accurate and detailed picture of what is happening with carbon storage over time in tropical forests. See the Wake Forest news article here.
  • Dr. Ovidiu Csillik’s Work Published in PNAS
    Dr. Ovidiu Csillik is pleased to share that his recent publication in PNAS has been featured in Reuters, Nature Highlights, and Mongabay. The study provides an in-depth analysis of aboveground carbon losses and gains in the Amazon forest, emphasizing the significant impact of forest degradation on the regional carbon balance. Utilizing high-resolution airborne laser […]
  • ENV Program welcomes new faculty
    As we wind down the summer and prepare to begin the 2024-2025 academic year, we are happy to welcome three new faculty members to the ENV team and send off Dr. Sames on new adventures. Dr. Leslie Straker has joined us from the WFU Graduate Program in Sustainability.  He has coastal expertise in natural and […]
  • Picture of Julie Velasquez
    Velásquez Runk published in Science Direct
    Dr. Julie Velásquez Runk, Director, Professor & Weigl Fellow of Environment and Sustainability Studies, has published “Looking through the lens of social science approaches: A scoping review of leishmaniases and Chagas disease research” in Science Direct – Acta Tropica
  • Climate Risk Mapping
    by Ella Gay (’24). I was initially drawn to this internship because of the environmental research aspect that it seemed to offer. As a biology major interested in research and an environmental studies minor looking to explore the effects of climate change, it seemed like a perfect fit. I feel like my three years of […]