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Advancing Ocean Conservation, Climate Action and Sustainable Blue Economies

Signs of progress: Coastal ecosystems that protect communities from hurricanes are now being treated as insurance mechanisms. A treaty exists to end harmful fishing subsidies worldwide. And a legal framework is in place to protect the high seas, which cover most of the planet.

Research is driving applied solutions and systemic change, said John Bohorquez, opening speaker of the Blue Economy Summit during Oceans Week at Duke in March.

“We have seen incredible progress for the ocean, but we are at a turning point. if we look back at 2025, it has been a remarkable period with new partnerships, and momentum that matters. Yet some of the core challenges haven’t changed, including finance to support a regenerative and sustainable blue economy. We need to unlock more capital to support oceans. We need to build on successes. In the context of the ocean, it is about translating ideas into solutions that scale, and real action that drives system change,” said Bohorquez, founder of Blue Economy Solutions Lab and adjunct assistant professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

That urgency carried through Oceans Week at Duke (March 23-27), which featured the Blue Economy Summit alongside a series of events focused on ocean and climate solutions—key priorities within the Duke Climate Commitment. From new financial models for coastal protection to emerging blue technologies, the week underscored how ocean research is being translated into scalable, real-world impact for sustainability in the blue economy.

“Our goal for the Blue Economy Summit this year and every year is to bring together oceans experts for a sustainable future.” said Stephanie J. Rousso, managing director of Oceans at Duke and founder of her own startup Pesca.Blue: Seafood with Purpose.

Blue Economy Summit: From Science to Startup for a Sustainable and Equitable Ocean

Keynote speaker Kristin Rechberger, Duke ’95 and CEO of Dynamic Planet and Revive Our Ocean, traced her path from public policy and storytelling to building a company focused on restoring nature through market-based solutions.

“I studied at the Sanford School of Public Policy, one of the few places that offered a public policy degree. I was attracted to systems change aspect of policy,” she said. “I was also attracted to media; my grandparents were great storytellers – and so I also got a certificate in documentary studies.”

She joined National Geographic, serving as head of business development from 1998 to 2005 before moving to the National Geographic Society, where she deepened her focus on programs that combine storytelling with impact. She later founded Dynamic Planet to help advance restoration through investment and market development.

“I learned that the ocean is a treasure trove for people and planet. But our oceans are in crisis,” she said. Enric Sala, executive director of Pristine Seas for National Geographic, joined her. Together, they were the executive directors of the film Ocean with David Attenborough. Sala joined faculty, students and guests for a special planning dinner with World Ocean Council CEO, Stewart Sarcozy-Banoczy, who also spoke at the summit.

Panel: From Discovery to Design

Following the keynote, the first panel explored how marine research is moving toward market-ready solutions. Panelists Mark Huang, Shannon Parker ’21, Nelly Ramírez- Moncada and Ty Roach joined faculty moderators Douglas Nowacek and Rebecca Vidra for a conversation.

Parker emphasized the value of university environments for early-stage innovation. “It can be harder to test applications in the real-world environment. But here at Duke we have Duke Forest, the Marine Lab, and we have the ability to go out and pilot test. Universities are an incredible home for early-stage innovation that you don’t have access to otherwise, especially if you are a garage lab entrepreneur.”

Roach highlighted the need for speed and iteration. “You have to move at Silicon Valley speed, but with academic resources. Remove the idea that your idea has to be perfect; putting your idea or tech out in the world is best peer review you will get. Wholome Arks is a perfect example – we learned a lot by doing that.”

Huang pointed to rapid technological advancement. “Tech advances are moving so fast; see if you can get things done. Pilot, learn, adjust and scale.”

Ramírez-Moncada grounded the conversation in market realities connecting her work with BFA Global. “You are solving a problem – for the person willing to pay for it.”

Panel: From Innovation to Impact

A second panel focused on how finance and policy can scale conservation and support equitable growth. Panelists Laura Deaton ’89, Charlotte Hudson ’99, Suzanne Johnson ’90 and Alexandra Leeper joined moderator Xiao Recio-Blanco, SJD ’15, who brought support and insights from his work on the thriving blue economy at Builders Vision.

Recio-Blanco underscored the need to align conservation with economic realities. “We cannot ask coastal communities across the world to protect the ocean and marine living resources just for the sake of it if those communities and those economies highly depend on seafood and marine living resources for basic income or basic protein or both. We need to be creative, and we need to find solutions that work, that are resilient and that are also culturally acceptable. at the same time, we need to promote solutions that elevate sustainability, while at the same time increasing financial stability.”

Johnson described efforts to connect companies, science and finance. “At the UN Global Compact, I work with companies and bring them together with science, finance, governments to help install better practices in the ocean economy space. Our theory is that if companies are better able to disclose their impact on the ocean, then investors will be able to better to differentiate between companies on the basis of their impact on the ocean.”

Deaton outlined an innovative conservation finance model. “As executive director of Multiplier, we are looking at: What would happen if a nonprofit took grant funds and invested directly into supply chain actors and did so with conservation metrics as part of those loans, to forgive the loan debt and the ROI on the loan becomes the conservation metrics. Instead of paying back in money, we pay back in quantifiable conservation outcomes. I care deeply about bringing change to the world in a positive way, leveraging tools like law and policy to gravitate toward change that has scale and tying our work to communities of greatest need.”

Hudson of Blue Convergence emphasized interdisciplinary thinking. “We can no longer think, ‘I’m just an ecologist, so I’m really only going to think about fisheries management from an ecological point of view.’ Now we’re not just thinking about the fish and the whales, but we’re thinking about the people and the communities that are impacted by the regulatory systems being put in place, as well as the ecosystems that are being degraded.”

Leeper reflected on connecting research with industry. “I’ve worked across the blue economy, all the way from science and oil and gas and a little bit of ecology and agriculture. Eventually that took me to Iceland, where I am today, at the Iceland Ocean Cluster. Large scale fishing companies, the entrepreneurs, the research communities were not having an opportunity to meet together, and the wealth of data that the research communities and universities were creating were not reaching either of these groups effectively. (The Iceland Ocean Cluster approach) has transformed the value and the structure of the economy. … science is totally key to the whole ecosystem of full utilization in Iceland.”

Rebuilding Ocean Ecosystems to Help Nature and People

Oceans Week included the annual symposium of Duke RESTORE, an initiative within the Nicholas School of the Environment, which highlighted ocean teams comprised of undergraduate and graduate level students working on coral reef, seagrass and living shorelines restoration.

Brian Silliman, director of Duke RESTORE, described the initiative’s applied research model. “With this approach, investors can see where funds are going and we can change conservation outcomes,” he said.

One example is seagrass restoration. Historically, efforts have struggled due to high costs and unreliable seed dispersal. The Duke RESTORE approach uses native clams filled with seagrass seeds, attached with eco-glue and dropped into the water. The clams, once dropped in seagrass restoration plots, serve as a microecosystem with substrate and fertilizer for the seagrass seeds to germinate. Partnering with the David W. Johnston lab helps distribute the seeds efficiently, using technology directly for conservation outcomes.

“We have replaced boats with drones, and divers with clams,” Silliman said.

Holistic coral reef restoration

Ty Roach presented work from the Duke RESTORE coral reef team and the startup Wholome Arks.

“Coral reefs are declining. We have lost about half globally in the last 50 years and will lose more,” Roach said. “The restoration success rate is very small, and typically involves growing one type of coral. It’s climate fragile.”

The Duke RESTORE team is taking a holistic approach.

“We are hacking the wholome,” Roach said, working to restore the full ecosystem surrounding coral, including bacteria and viruses, through interventions such as phage therapy and probiotics.

“The goal is climate-wise restoration. We are only one heat wave away from loss of restoration,” he said.

The team has developed a coral library capable of generating extensive data from minimal samples.

“From a sample the size of a grain of rice, we can gain a terabyte of data,” he said.

They are advancing climate-smart restoration across three ocean basins and can predict coral bleaching with 90% accuracy. Using climate technology, the team restores bleached coral in a way that mirrors personalized medicine at an ecosystem scale. Through Wholome Arks, they are building modular reef systems designed to double coral survivorship while supporting robust marine ecosystems.

Coastal dunes renewed

Joe Morton, a postdoctoral researcher with Duke RESTORE, is working on coastal dune restoration in Florida.

“Restoration of coastal dunes fails most of the time. We spend millions in hopes that coastal restoration will withstand storms, with large hurricanes hitting the Florida coast several times a year. Meanwhile, coastal dunes take one to three years to grow – and they serve as the first line of coastal defense,” Morton said.

To accelerate growth, the team experimented with dense planting of dune grasses. The results showed that densely planted grasses created protective canopies and improved resilience. When Hurricane Ian struck, the plots with dense planting survived. Local officials in St. Johns County are now applying the approach in storm-impacted areas.

Ocean Exchanges Expo: Our One Shared Ocean

The Ocean Exchanges Expo included 26 lightning talks from students and alumni sharing innovative projects, regenerative ocean business ideas, independent research, and calls to action, a poster session and an expo for attendees to share ocean-focused interdisciplinary research, projects and ideas.

Humpback whales and noise pollution

Lizzy Glazer, a senior double major in marine science and conservation and neuroscience, is researching how human-generated noise affects humpback whales. A Rachel Carson Scholar, former NOAA Hollings Scholar and president of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Duke Hub, Glazer conducted fieldwork with the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary as part of her senior thesis.

Her research finds vessel noise is changing whale behavior.

“We have found that humpback whales are altering their dive behavior when they’re exposed to vessel noise, and they often end their song in the middle of a verse when a boat comes by. These humpbacks are being impacted by vessel noise, and we need to be able to basically understand which ways we’re impacting them and how their changes in behavior might impact the population long term,” Glazer said.

The research team used suction-cup acoustic tags placed via drone to collect 24-hour data on whale movement and sound. Instruments included accelerometers, magnetometers, pressure sensors and hydrophones to track diving patterns, singing behavior and exposure to boat noise.

“We spent a lot of the wintertime recording this tag data by going out, finding whales, plopping a tag on them, letting that tag stay for about a day, and then collecting that tag again and continuing the process with a lot of whales. We were able to go through all of that data, find periods of vessel noise where the animals were being exposed to boat sound, and then link that up to their dive behavior and their acoustic behavior,” Glazer said.

Glazer hopes the findings will raise awareness of ocean noise as a form of pollution.

“I think we often don’t consider ocean noise as a source of pollution, but it definitely is. My study just shows that noise is altering behavior for humpback whales, and therefore we might be having significant consequences on these animals that we don’t necessarily know about because we don’t consider noise as something being so harmful,” she said.

Sea urchin responses to high heat

Ava Kocher is a junior studying sea urchin responses to climate change, specifically marine heat waves, and how they deal physiologically with high heat and high saline conditions. 

“I conducted my work at the Duke Marine Lab in controlled seawater tanks, measuring different treatments of stressors, and then trying to see what the sea urchin’s response was and how its health changed with that stress,” she said. Key research questions included whether the urchin could right itself during heat stress, as well as its respiration rate and oxygen consumption.

Kocher found that the N.C. urchin population, the northernmost range of its species, has a much lower thermal threshold than the southern population in Florida. Respiration rate took a huge turn for the worse around day five, indicating subtle changes in physiology as the sea urchins deal with stress. 

“The impact of this research is huge because sea urchins are a key grazer species. Understanding how they’re going to respond to increasing climate change tells us a little bit about how the ecosystem itself can handle heat waves,” Kocher said.

She added: “Diseased sea urchins can sometimes recover. If we can lower the stress through mitigating climate change, that would have a positive effect on the animals that live in that environment.”

Coral reef bleaching events

Junior David Mann shared his independent study project on coral bleaching, working with Ty Roach at the Duke Marine Lab. 

“My data is from a natural bleaching event in Hawaii due to high temperatures. And the interesting thing that happened in this bleaching event was that some of Porites compressa coral was bleached and some did not, in the same reef, in the same event. What was driving this different bleaching response among corals?” Mann said. 

The researchers sampled the corals and performed LC-MS metabolomics — liquid chromatography mass spectrometry — yielding a molecular signature of the samples. 

“The first question was: Could we detect a historical bleaching signature in these corals? Five years after the event, after all the corals had recovered and were healthy and indistinguishable from each other, are there still differences at the molecular level between ones that bleached five years ago and ones that did not? What we found is that there is a difference. It’s slight, but it’s significant,” Mann said. 

“The next step was to ask: how can we amplify this signature to perhaps identify what compounds are most important in driving the bleaching difference? We used a tree-building algorithm called a random forest to rank every metabolite, every feature, every compound, by its importance in determining bleaching response. What we found is that there are a few more important compounds that are overrepresented in corals that did bleach, and underrepresented in corals that did not bleach,” he said. 

“Understanding the mechanisms behind coral bleaching is really important for coral conservation. If we can understand what makes a coral more susceptible to bleaching, then we can use this information to protect corals in the wild,” Mann said. 

More highlights from the week:

• The Ocean Policy Working Group held a Restoration Symposium with guest speakers Sara DiBacco Childs, Duke ’08 (executive director, The Duke Forest), and Claire Rapp (salt marsh campaign coordinator, North Carolina Coastal Federation).
  
  
• The Duke School of Nursing hosted a screening of the documentary “A Plastic Ocean” about the global effects of plastic pollution and technologies for a cleaner ocean.
  
  
• The Duke Hub of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) held a discussion on citizen activism featuring Nicholas School graduate Hugh Cipparone, who has created a documentary highlighting Florida fisherfolk impacted by climate change and disaster resilience tools for fishing communities.
  
  
• Wil Burns, co-director for the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University spoke about Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) approaches, examining whether they can be developed safely, viably, and at scales that matter for climate mitigation during an event co-sponsored by Oceans@Duke and the Duke Center on Risk.
  
  
• A Tide Talk about sustainable ocean energy featured special guest speaker George Bonner, director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program at NC State University & Coastal Studies Institute.

Oceans Week was organized by faculty, staff and students of Duke University, with leadership from Stephanie J. Rousso and John Virdin, support from the Nicholas Institute of Energy, Environment & Sustainability and Duke Climate Commitment, and student leadership from: Graham Gaiter, Sameer Swarup, Lulu Louchheim, Alexis Shenkiryk, Seneca RiceWoolf, Kevin Rafferty, Megan Dear, Sofia Velazquez and Maggie Dunn.

Get Involved:

• Learn more about the summit.
• Join the Oceans at Duke email list.
• Make a gift to Oceans@Duke.
• Questions? Reach out to dukeoceans_info@duke.edu.
   

Kirsten Khire, Jeremy Ashton, Melissa Fernandez and Noor Nazir contributed to this story and photo package.

“Leading this class is one of the coolest parts of my job,” says Jackson Ewing, Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. The class is a practicum course focused around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the primary UN body for climate diplomacy around the world. Each year, the UNFCCC hosts a summit, known as COP (Conference of Parties). The summit brings together tens of thousands of people from all over the world, with numerous countries represented, companies from global conglomerates to startups, and nonprofits and NGOs big and small. This year’s summit is COP30 – the 30th year of meetings.  

Students in the immersive practicum come from all over Duke. They are undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students from the Sanford School, Nicholas School of the Environment, Pratt School of Engineering, Fuqua School of Business, Law, Humanities and beyond. Roughly 15 are accepted into the course each year, during which they work in partnership with one of the active participants in COP. Each week, students are taught by leaders in climate policy from across sectors, learning from visiting real-world practitioners how climate work gets done. During the course, students also travel to Washington, DC to meet with policymakers, and to COP to see real-world policymaking in action. 

“There’s no substitute for actually being at one of these summits,” Ewing says. “You cannot understand it until you’ve been there. Well, maybe not understand – I’ve been going over 15 years and I am not sure I understand it,” Ewing jokes, “but really, the access is unique and being able to see the policy work in action is invaluable.” 

Ewing has run the practicum for the last three years. The class began eight years ago as a student initiative and has evolved into the credit-bearing intensive course it is today. Ewing loves the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds of the students, a diversity he says matches the wide array and divergent worldviews of players in the climate and energy space.  

“We have students who want to be corporate sustainability officers. We have others who just want to burn the whole system down.” Ewing sees value in that tension. “The main thing we try to do in the class is put the students in a position to have to understand the other side and embrace, understand, and accept the complexity. You have to deal with the reality as it is and not let what you would like to see in a perfect world drive you to constant frustration or lead you to really unpragmatic approaches.” 

This semester, one of the guest lecturers in the course is a current Duke undergraduate. She’s a Brazilian national who took the course last year. With the COP summit in Brazil this year, she took a pause on her degree to work full-time in Brazil on efforts to prepare and execute COP30. Ewing says, “she’ll return to her studies as an example of what our practicum students can do, and as a tangible example of the external engagement piece of the Climate Commitment.” 

Ewing’s own research portfolio spans both domestic and international work. In the U.S., he collaborates with colleagues around expanding clean firm power deployment, enhancing grid flexibility, and improving power market policies. He also helps lead “From Billions to Trillions,” a series of Duke University convenings that have brought together thought leaders for productive exchanges about accelerating private climate investment. Internationally, he works with emerging economies in the Global South, particularly in Asia, on meeting their unique energy transition challenges. He claims his work can be fairly “technical and wonky” but its impact at a systems and individual level is unmistakable. 

“From a human perspective, those are countries with some of the greatest climate vulnerabilities and the greatest development needs, which dovetail with climate realities in the sense that they need energy access. They need stronger agricultural resilience. They are a lot of the various health and human development indicators that hinge on the provision of reliable and affordable energy. By working in some of those places, if you’re able to be effective, then you’re contributing to better lives for the people that live there. That’s a sandbox worth playing in.” 

Photos courtesy of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.

“Study nature, not books,” is one of ecologist Brian Silliman’s guiding principles and favorite phrases. It’s a quote from 19th-century naturalist Louis Agassiz that is (wonderfully, hilariously) on a sign outside a library at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. That’s not to say Silliman doesn’t also love books. The Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology and Director of the Duke Wetland and Coasts Center in the Nicholas School of the Environment started his academic career as a double major in history and science at University of Virginia.  

“The great thing about studying the humanities is that they teach you to question everything where science teaches you to conform to everything. That’s just the way it is. My lab, my students and I, we’ve had a lot of papers that have been paradigm changing and I attribute that to the fact that we spend a lot of time in the field. We ask nature, not books, how things work. Of course, this then creates a feedback where we seek to focus on areas where nature tells us something different than books.  When it does, we revise understanding. Confronting theory with real data from nature to see if it’s right or wrong is one of our favorite things to do.”  

Silliman’s background also informs how he discusses his research. He likes to describe ecological systems the way an economist might describe a marketplace, as a dynamic system where a few key actors can set the tone for everything else. “Species are interacting everywhere, through competition, predation and partnerships, but there are a few levers, or species interactions, that are way more important than the others. If we pull them, you can help shape the whole structure and function of that system. Thus all species are not created equally,” he says. Silliman has built his career uncovering those levers, the species interactions that determine how an ecosystem thrives or collapses. 

In a recent paper in Nature, Silliman and his team demonstrate how sea otters, a natural predator, keep the ecosystem in balance by eating a quarter of their own body weight in crabs every day. This crab diet indirectly allows the salt marshes to grow and stabilize, since crabs “proliferate and devour the marsh plants. They eat the roots and riddle the marshes with burrows, actions that both cause severe creek bank erosion,” setting off a chain of marsh decline, as chunks of marsh fall into the sea. With otters in the system, plants can return and thrive, shorelines can be rebuilt and stabilized, and biodiversity flourishes. “Otters are a keystone species,” Silliman explains. “They drive trophic cascades that ripple through the system.” Reintroducing them is not only ecologically powerful but much, much cheaper than significant engineering solutions like adding sediment to marshes. 

The otter example is one of competition, predators and prey, resources and consumers, supply and demand, a typical economic and ecological way of understanding natural systems. But Silliman also explores “mutualisms,” positive interactions, or partnerships, between species that may have beneficial effects on the actors. “For a long time, ecology focused on competition and predation,” he says. “Competition is of course a driving force, but often it’s these strong positive interactions that are the primary reason ecosystems can develop and persist over time. It’s only after that mutualism that competition structures the system.” For example, Silliman and his students have discovered that the primary reason southeastern US salt marshes don’t collapse and turn into mud flats with massive droughts is due to a mutualism marsh plants have with mussels in their roots. The mussels bathe the plant’s roots in nutrient rich “mussel poop” and oxygenated water, increasing their ability to resist death due to intense drought. In addition, mussels attract mud crabs that burrow around them for a home. In turn those mud crabs eat plant grazing snails, adding another layer of resilience.  Mussels increase drought tolerance and recovery of the plants that build the ecosystem, upon which all other services are generated, like fisheries production, erosion suppression, and improved water quality.  

These insights inform Siliman’s leadership of Duke Restore, an ambitious Nicholas School initiative that seeks to reimagine how we can rebuild ecosystems. Duke Restore designs restoration projects that deliberately harness or mimic these foundations. And biological partnerships.  For instance, they cluster, rather than separate, organisms with their natural partners—trees with microbial fungi, marsh grasses with crabs, corals with mussels. “PhD students in my lab go out into an ecosystem and try to figure out what are the most important interactions that control that ecosystem’s resilience. They then take that knowledge and apply it to the design of how you restore that ecosystem. We’re maximizing regrowth by minimizing competition and by harnessing all the positive relationships organisms need to build an ecosystem. If you leave out those partners, you set the system up to fail,” he says. By rebuilding with these relationships in mind, restoration becomes more resilient. 

Climate impact makes the work even more urgent. Silliman notes that stressors like heat, drought, and salinity shifts are already reshaping species interactions, sometimes with devastating consequences. But his research has also shown that more predators and mutualism can actually increase an ecosystem’s ability to withstand climate stress. And the effects are not small, increasing climate stress tolerance of foundational organisms like marsh grass, corals, seagrasses and oysters by 10-50%. That knowledge helps Duke Restore design projects for the future, including planting heat-resistant species and exploring genetic innovations that could give vulnerable ecosystems a fighting chance. 

For Silliman, the goal is not just to restore ecosystems to what they once were but to rebuild them for the conditions ahead. “Nature has already given us the tools,” he says. “Our job is to learn from those partnerships and scale them up.” 

Photos courtesy of Nicholas School of the Environment.

“I love marine invertebrates so much. They are just so cool and interesting. And I just want other people to love them too.” 

Clearly, it is difficult to overstate how passionate Juliet Wong is about her work and her research as part of the Duke Marine Lab. The love of the ocean and its creatures started early for her.

“My father is a retired family practice doctor, but he has always been an avid fisherman and now that he’s retired, he has a lot more time for fishing. He always would take me fishing when I was a kid, and I think that kind of instilled in me this whole desire for maintaining healthy oceans.” 

Wong is an assistant professor of Coastal and Marine Climate Change in the Nicholas School of the Environment. She joined Duke after a postdoctoral fellowship at Florida International University, drawn by Duke’s explicit institutional commitment to climate research. “It was really important to me to be at a university where I felt like my work would be acknowledged and supported at the institutional level,” she explains.  

For Wong, Duke’s Marine Lab stands out because of its deep integration of students at all levels—undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral—into the research enterprise. Unlike many other marine labs that focus primarily on graduate students or operate only during the summer, Duke’s lab offers year-round teaching and mentorship. Wong delights in this opportunity: “I can not only get out into the lab and the field, but I can also get students there. Being somewhere like the Marine Lab is a big deal for somebody like me, because it means having access to all these resources in one place.” 

Her teaching reflects this same philosophy. In her classes, students learn not only from lectures but also from hands-on labs and fieldwork, collecting local organisms, observing them live, and studying their behaviors under the microscope. “You get so much more out of it, like getting to actually find and see those animals in their local environments,” she says.   

The ability to move fluidly between the field and the lab is also central to her research program. Early in her appointment, Wong tapped into Duke’s Bass Connections program, which allows faculty to form interdisciplinary research teams with undergraduates and master’s students, a key factor for a junior professor still working to attract PhD students and postdocs to her lab. Through this structure, she quickly built a team to investigate climate change impacts on oysters. The project has since grown into a partnership with local oyster farms, expanding beyond Duke’s own teaching farm to include collaborations with farmers across North Carolina. This work addresses urgent questions about why oysters are experiencing unexplained die-offs and how changing environmental conditions affect their performance and survival.  

“We know that oysters are very economically important to this region but they are ecologically important, too. They also provide a bunch of other ecosystem services. They improve water quality because they’re filter feeding. They make reef structures that provide habitat for other organisms. They’re important for stabilizing shorelines and preventing erosion, and breaking up wave activity from storms. Oyster reefs help protect people’s homes by attenuating wave energy.”  

While we can’t overstate Wong’s passion for her ocean research, she also doesn’t understate the reasons for it. “There’s such a human connection to the ocean, to food. I did my Ph.D. on the red urchin, which is one of the main species harvested for uni, for sushi. Sometimes it’s hard to describe why our research is important, or why people should care. But you know, when you’re talking about people’s dinners or their livelihoods, people do care.” 

Photos by Jared Lazarus/Duke Marketing and Communications

For David Hoffman, Duke’s Climate Commitment is not just about emissions or energy but about values. “The word commitment really means something,” he says. “It’s an expression of institutional values. Our job is to interrogate those values and then connect them to action so that the benefits extend beyond ourselves, to society at large.” 

Hoffman, who is the Steed Family Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy and also the Interim Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, came to Duke after 23 years at Intel Corporation, where he was associate general counsel focusing on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and privacy. His time in the private sector has informed his academic career at Duke. 

“A portion of my work has a focus on the climate impacts of technology, both positive and negative. We want to identify the opportunities technology creates for making a better impact on climate, but also the costs that are associated with its pursuit,” Hoffman says. 

One pressing example is the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and its demand for electricity. “We’ve been focused on semiconductor supply chains and artificial intelligence data center operations, and particularly the implications for energy consumption and load growth,” says Hoffman. “How can we forecast these impacts and make meaningful policy recommendations to shape incentives and governance responsibly?” 

To further advance this theoretical and practical agenda, in early 2025, Hoffman co-founded the Deep Tech Initiative with economist Aaron Chatterji, Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at the Fuqua School of Business. The Initiative focuses on five linked domains: semiconductors, renewable energy, quantum computing, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Its aim is to create classes, host events and publish research that bring academic and industry policy perspectives together. “Both private and public capital are necessary,” Hoffman says. “The question is, what incentives need to be created, and what guardrails need to be put in place, to optimize those investments for the public good?” 

Hoffman points to the Deep Tech’s unique economics/business/law/policy-first versus technology-first approach, and notes that while most universities struggle to bridge disciplines, Duke’s “interdisciplinary connective tissue” makes collaboration across schools and units unusually easy. Just as important is the blend of experience he and Chatterji bring: Hoffman with a global technology legal and industry background, Chatterji with government economic policy and now from his role as chief economist at OpenAI. Together, they have built a program that links the worlds of research, regulation, and capital investment, while applying strict criteria to keep partnerships aligned with Duke’s values and commitments. 

Hoffman also talks eagerly about the “art of public policy” and in a new project (done in collaboration with North Carolina singer-songwriter Tift Merritt) probes how AI may reshape society’s capacity to pursue change. He and his students are examining how algorithmically generated art and music might shape public values and collective action on issues such as climate. “If creative output has historically connected people emotionally and driven them to act together for social change,” Hoffman asks, “what do we give up, what does it mean for democracy, if algorithms, not human beings, are deciding what stories we hear?” 

Hoffman insists on connecting values to practice and emphasizes teaching students to interrogate their own values and align them with action. “Everything we do is political,” Hoffman says, “but our goal is to be nonpartisan by focusing on values. The Climate Commitment gives us a framework to act on those values and to build technologies and policies that serve society.” 

Photos courtesy of the Sanford School of Public Policy

After graduating from Yale in political science, Tim Profeta volunteered at the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC).  

“Environmental issues are this multidimensional multidisciplinary monster and I didn’t know exactly where my passion was. I got exposed to all these people – economists, chemists, biologists, lawyers. I realized I liked the role of the lawyer. I wanted to be the one who put the suit on and executed on all this acquired knowledge.” 

Profeta ended up applying to Duke Law School, where the Dean of Admissions, after hearing about his passion for the environment, asked whether he’d be interested in pursuing a joint master’s degree in environmental management to go with his Law degree.

“Here was Duke personalizing my educational path for me,” he recalled. “That’s when I knew I belonged here.” 

While in school at Duke, Profeta was able to start executing on the acquired knowledge he’d imagined when volunteering at the NRDC.

“Friends of mine in law school would be just in this soup of acronyms when learning environmental law and wouldn’t really understand what they were learning or why. I would be there taking biology class or the economics class at the same time that contextualized what the statute was trying to do and gave me a much better affinity to understand what the intended policy outcomes of the environmental statutes were.” 

From there, Profeta went to Washington, where he became Senator Joe Lieberman’s point person on climate change. That experience of negotiating, drafting legislation, and managing the complexities of the DC climate bureaucracy shaped the instincts he would bring back to Duke. In 2005, he became the founding director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions—known today as the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.  

The institute was something of a “unicorn,” Profeta explains, because it was designed from the start to operate differently than traditional academic units. Profeta credits the late Peter Nicholas, whom Profeta calls “a force of nature,” with this unique orientation. “Pete had named the Nicholas School, which was doing all the amazing things schools do – faculty research, teaching students, disseminating knowledge through society – and he said, ‘Okay, but who’s talking to the White House? Who’s talking to Congress? Who’s talking to corporate CEOs? Let’s build that.’ So they gave this gift to create an institute and fortuitously,” Profeta laughs, “I was the second but eventual top choice of the committee.” 

From the outset, the Institute hired professionals who could translate research into action.

“There is a chasm between academia and applied audiences,” Profeta said. “You need special people who can bridge that gap.”

As the institute’s director until 2021, Profeta built a team of nearly 50 professionals who do just that. The Institute’s team draws on Duke’s interdisciplinary culture to convene leaders from inside and outside academe, in industry and government to drive environmental policy and impact. Sometimes Nicholas Institute experts even take on temporary assignments within government agencies, as Profeta did during a sabbatical in 2022-2024, when he worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  

Now back at Duke as an Executive in Residence at the Institute, Profeta shared a recent example of the Institute’s work. “We’ve convened southeastern energy regulators for the last dozen years. In one of our last meetings, these guys are talking about how to deal with the fact we have this ravenous demand for energy coming out of data centers. I brought this superstar PhD student Tyler Norris to the meeting.” Norris had been the head of policy for a major renewable company before he enrolled to get his doctorate at Duke. 

“So a Georgia commissioner asks whether there’s any flexibility in energy demand; he thought you had to keep your data center on 24/7,” Profeta recalls. “That was on a Friday. I wake up on Monday morning and Tyler’s already run the numbers. He figured out that across 15 regions we don’t use 47% of our electric grid on average. It sits there unused. And he showed how tiny shifts in demand and behavior could free up the equivalent of 35 nuclear power plants worth of capacity.” 

That research this year became the most downloaded report the Nicholas Institute’s ever had. “I’ve got CEOs of companies writing about it. I’ve got energy regulators now creating policy around it. Dick Brodhead (former Duke President) liked to say our university responsibility is to ‘create knowledge in the service of society.’ I love that that’s what the Nicholas Institute does every day.” 

Photos courtesy of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability

A conversation at her kitchen table several years ago profoundly changed Dr. Valerie Sabol’s life and career. Sabol, a Clinical Professor and Director of Planetary Health at the Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON), recalls the moment vividly. 

“My son was doing his genetics homework, and I jokingly asked what he thought his future child might look like. He got very serious and said, ‘Climate change, Mom. Why would I bring a child into a world we’re destroying?’” 

Those words stopped her in her tracks. “I realized I didn’t have an answer,” she says. “Right there, I decided it was time to retool my tool belt.” 

Sabol has long cared for vulnerable populations, particularly for older adults. She also provides clinical care at the Durham VA’s Perioperative Optimization of Senior Health (POSH) Clinic. But that conversation with her son reshaped her professional purpose. 

“As a nurse, I hold one of the most trusted voices in healthcare,” she reflects. “What good is that trust if I’m not using it to advocate for the health of our planet and its ecosystems, which directly and indirectly affect human health?” 

What began as a personal awakening has evolved into professional leadership. Today, Sabol serves as the inaugural Director of Planetary Health at DUSON, an initiative in response to the Duke Climate Commitment. “Planetary health” she explains, “is about recognizing that human and environmental health are inseparable. If the planet suffers, so do we.” 

Nursing has always centered on caring for the whole person and are often the first to observe the health effects of poor air quality, extreme heat, and other environmental hazards, which positions them to respond with both care and advocacy. 

Sabol envisions a future where all nurses are “climate fluent,” prepared to help communities adapt to environmental change and prevent future health risks. “Nurses aren’t just caregivers; we’re educators, scientists, and change agents.” 

At the Durham VA, Sabol integrates planetary health directly into patient care. Traditionally, pre-surgical screenings focus on physical and mental health. Now, the POSH team also evaluates environmental and climate-related risks, such as extreme heat, a growing threat for aging veterans. 

“An average North Carolina summer day can be dangerous, especially for veterans with multiple chronic conditions,” she explains. By reviewing where veterans live, their access to cooling, and their medications, the surgical team can adjust treatment plans, such as altering medication timing or dosage, to prevent heat-related illness. “This is adaptive, climate-responsive care,” Sabol says. “It’s about anticipating environmental impacts on health and addressing them proactively.” 

Sabol is equally committed to preparing future nurses. Rather than creating separate courses, she helps DUSON faculty embed planetary health content throughout pre-licensure, master’s, DNP, and PhD programs.  

“By weaving these ideas across the curriculum, we teach students to recognize connections and take evidence-based action,” she explains. Her students participate in hands-on simulations, assembling “Go Bags” for patients facing climate-driven crises, such as a child with asthma during wildfire smoke or a pregnant woman evacuating before a hurricane. “The conversations during these exercises are powerful,” Sabol says. “Students leave inspired and ready to act.” 

Through the Duke Climate Commitment, Sabol co-chairs the Education Integration Subcommittee, ensuring all Duke learners and community partners can engage in solutions-focused climate and health initiatives. She also collaborates on interprofessional projects such as Duke’s Coursera course, Climate and Health for Healthcare Professions, expanding global climate-health literacy. 

Sabol’s motivation began with her son’s fear for the future but has come full circle. “My son who once felt hopeless is now planning a career in this space,” she shares. “Seeing his outlook transform has been the most rewarding part.” 

Sabol grounds her message in what resonates most, health and safety. Her guiding question, “How might climate-related disruptions where you live or work impact your health?”, encourages people to take personal and community action.  

Her journey shows how one conversation can ignite a movement, from the kitchen table to classrooms and clinics worldwide. “When we align nursing’s compassion and expertise with planetary health,” she says, “we create a healthier, more sustainable world for generations to come.” 

Photos courtesy of Valerie Sabol and Duke School of Nursing

David Brown began to dig deep into the challenges of the energy transition when he began his work with GRACE, “a grid that is risk aware for clean electricity,” an ARPA-E funded initiative seeking to solve problems “prevalent in current electrical power systems.” In a kind of Oceans 11 scenario for the project, he was chosen as a team member for GRACE because of his algorithmic and analytical chops, not a career to that point delving into clean energy. That’s different now.  

Brown is the Snow Family Business Professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, where he has been on the faculty since getting his PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I’ve always enjoyed methodological research because it provides a unique opportunity to learn about different application areas – and I’ve long had an interest in energy systems, given their complexity and importance to the world.”  

“The through line of my work is optimization – I am interested in understanding how to allocate limited resources in the most efficient way, especially when facing uncertainty. In large-scale energy systems such as electric utilities, developing flexible, forward-looking methods for optimizing the mix of energy generation and storage is key to improving their efficiency, measured both in terms of costs as well as emissions.”  

In Brown’s work on electricity, energy, and utilities, he seeks to understand the uncertainties of consumer usage and demand, and how climate impacts like extreme heat or hurricanes, or data centers surging because of AI upticks, are exacerbated by the intermittency of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. “How do we deal with all this information and make our utilities operate and deploy resources in a more efficient, reliable way?” Brown asks. 

Through the development of optimization technology that explicitly incorporates real-time uncertainty, Brown’s research demonstrates that large utilities such as Duke Energy could lower costs by 2–3% immediately, and by 5–6% or more depending on how much renewable capacity grows in the future. “This doesn’t require massive capital investment such as new transmission capacity – just smarter algorithms in daily planning.”  

Brown is also deeply interested in the role of distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar, home batteries, and electric vehicles that can shift energy across time. “We have millions of distributed energy resources in the US alone, and utilities are actively exploring virtual power plant models,” he says. “Leveraging these resources effectively requires thoughtful incentives and methods for efficient coordination.”  

Unfortunately, current regulations do not necessarily provide utilities strong incentives to improve operational efficiency. “Utilities and grid operators are sophisticated but they don’t explicitly model these uncertainties in their daily operations, primarily because it’s difficult. In this era of mass electrification, that needs to change. Our methods account for this uncertainty, and we believe properly capturing this can help to inform incentives in a way that benefits everyone.” 

In addition to his research and teaching, Brown also serves as Faculty Director for the Center for Energy Development in the Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke’s The Fuqua School of Business. His ambitions for EDGE parallel those for how he imagines how his algorithms might alter the utility industry. “EDGE has been an amazing, student-focused enterprise from the outset and that won’t change, especially with Duke launching a new joint master’s degree in business, climate, and sustainability,” Brown says. “I’ve been inspired by the interdisciplinary aspects of the Duke Climate Commitment and I want EDGE to reflect that in how we feature, promote, and fuel faculty research across campus.”  

Brown reflects on his faculty role and its evolution in the context of Duke today, “it’s important to continue to advance state-of-the-art knowledge through traditional outlets, such as publishing in peer-reviewed journals. At the same time, especially when it comes to energy and sustainability solutions, we want these technologies actually deployed in practice to positively impact the world.” 

Photos courtesy of David Brown.

When the Duke Climate Commitment got started in 2022, Brian Murray, director of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, asked his leadership team to come to him with big ideas that would strengthen Duke’s impact on research and society. Medical geographer Ashley Ward clearly remembers answering that call.  

“As extreme heat was affecting more and more of the country, I noticed that nobody was integrating sectors to think about the issue from a policy perspective. In particular, the private sector was rarely included – and that’s who owns the energy infrastructure and the healthcare system. That’s who employs most people who are in high-exposure jobs. I wondered, ‘What would be possible if they were part of this conversation?’” 

From that first call to action came the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at the Nicholas Institute, and Ward, its inaugural Director. Ward leads three separate initiatives out of the “Heat Hub”: HeatWise, Bridging Divides, and Cooling Communities. “Mother Nature definitely helped me make my case; 2023 was one of the hottest years on record. Duke—with its location in the Southeast and its experts in so many relevant disciplines— is perfectly situated to lead these convening efforts.” 

Across the Heat Hub’s initiatives, Ward and her colleagues focus on expanding the questions asked about extreme heat—and who is engaged in the quest for solutions. The HeatWise initiative brings together researchers, private sector leaders, government officials, foundation officers, and community leaders from across the nation to identify key challenges and innovative approaches.    

“When you bring together people from diverse sectors, you see clearly that heat’s threats go far beyond health – it’s not just affecting our lives but our livelihoods, our physical, social and economic well-being.” 

To this end, the Heat Hub’s Bridging Divides initiative focuses on quantifying heat’s impacts on various sectors of the economy. In the next decade, heat will account for 72-73% of fixed asset losses across the telecommunications and utilities sectors. Operations and supply chain infrastructure are affected profoundly by extreme heat. “We need to capture the imagination of the private sector – including finance and insurance – with data. For example, $200 billion in local GDP was lost last year due to heat-induced labor slowdowns,” Ward says.  

“Heat-induced drought is affecting trucking, trains, and boats. For example, it is harder and harder to maintain cool storage temps when heat is so high – spoilage is a real quantifiable expense. Where are opportunities for innovation to help our economy adapt to this new reality?” Ward says. 

Ward also aims to advance heat solutions for rural America—a focus of the Heat Hub’s Cooling Communities initiative. “Many interventions – like cooling stations and cool pavement – are focused on urban populations. What about rural communities? What strategies could protect them in times of extreme heat?” Ward talks about her own experience being raised in a tobacco county, her father being the first in her town to get a high school diploma and she being the first to get a college degree (and masters, and PhD as well).  

“Growing up in a rural place taught me that nobody owns these problems or solutions – but it will take everybody to solve them,” Ward said. The Cooling Communities project—initially funded by an internal Duke University grant—focuses on how churches and community centers in rural North and South Carolina can strengthen communities’ resilience. “Faith leaders have shared invaluable insights on the challenges their communities face, how they’re responding, and what future solutions might work best in their local context.” 

A second phase of the Cooling Communities project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, is developing resources to launch a network of rural churches in the Carolinas that can move toward being fully-fledged, locally led resilience hubs. The project is also exploring innovative financing models, like parametric insurance, to support local institutions’ efforts. 

“You can’t see heat and its impacts in the way you can see a tornado or a hurricane—but at Duke we’re raising awareness of the scope of this challenge and creating opportunities for leaders to share knowledge and work together toward solutions,” says Ward. “We can’t do it all—but we can scale this work beyond Duke by creating the evidence base, piloting innovative approaches, and facilitating collaboration across sectors.”   

Photos courtesy of Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.