Environmental Justice Summit

An event to build sustainable community-university partnerships and foster collaborative, community-based research
Following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, only 6 km from the University of Minnesota Campus, students in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science felt that the university's mission to engage and serve was not being upheld due to a lack of connection with local communities. In response, graduate students and staff from the department organized a one-day workshop between UMN scientists and community members from across the Twin Cities with the goal of fostering meaningful relationships and building a mutual awareness, understanding, and capacity for community-centered research in the Twin Cities. After participating in the inaugural summit event in 2021, I became a member of the organizing team. We worked collaboratively with community partners to plan and hold the second iteration of this event in 2023. We aim to establish long lasting partnerships between researchers and community groups that facilitate earth science research and curriculum in alignment with community priorities. Successful partnerships started at these events have resulted in ArcGIS map making workshops to facilitate mapping of lead levels, sampling and analysis of urban garden soils, outreach and engagement with local youth groups, and fertilizer testing for urban gardens. We continue to engage with this work and aim to establish the institutional memory and support necessary to sustain this event.


Association of First-Generation Graduate Students

An organization to connect first-generation graduate students and help them navigate the hidden curriculum of academia
I am a founding member of the Association of First-Generation Graduate Students (AFGS) at the University of Minnesota, and served as our first vice-president. This student organization, which now has 109 members from 65 different programs across the university, provides a support system for graduate students who hold the first-gen identity. We hold community-building events to foster connections between first-generation graduate students and facilitate access to resources that help members navigate the hidden curriculum of academia. We also work closely with the UMN Graduate School's First-Gen Connect network to guide their programming and communicate the needs of first-gen graduate students.


Summer Science Deep Dive with Urban Roots

A program to engage local youth in scientific research and help build science identity
I established a partnership between the Santelli Lab and Urban Roots, an urban agriculture non-profit in East St. Paul that engages and empowers local youth through paid internships. This partnership, born out of a connection made at our departments Environmental Justice Summit, began with collaborative soil sampling to investigate heavy metal contamination at Urban Root's farm sites, and has grown into a reoccurring "Summer Science Deep Dive" program. The program is designed to engage youth interns in science to facilitate development of strong science identity and a foster a sense of belonging in academic spaces. University scientists mentor a cohort of youth interns as they design and implement a scientific study based at the flagship Urban Roots agricultural site. Following our first deep dive in the summer of 2023, interns continued to engage with the project as they designed an excellent research poster and communicated their findings at the University of Minnesota Earth Science Research Symposium!