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Meet our Post-Docs
The Arctic Initiative welcomed two new Postdoctoral Research Fellows to our team in January, Dr. Sarah Dewey and Dr. Sarah Mackie. While each has a background in a different discipline—Dr. Dewey in oceanography and Dr. Mackie in environmental law—they have found the Arctic Initiative to be a place where cross disciplinary collaboration is encouraged.
“We sat down together our first week at HKS,” explains Dr. Dewey, “and during a casual chat realized that we could combine our expertise to write a journal paper about Arctic marine plastic pollution. This kind of collaboration would never have happened without the Arctic Initiative bringing us together in Cambridge.”
Since joining the team Dr. Dewey and Dr. Mackie have been working on this joint publication as well as guiding students and Research Assistants through their own paper-writing processes for our Resilience Governance and Resilience Finance study groups. Abstracts for a number of these projects have been accepted for major international conferences due to take place in the coming year.
Not to be deterred by the pandemic, Dr. Dewey and Dr. Mackie have been leading outreach projects both at the Kennedy School and abroad, making use of new technological opportunities to reach people beyond Massachusetts. From elementary school aged Girl Scouts to graduate students, Dr. Dewey and Dr. Mackie have shared their expertise on the importance of understanding how climate change is impacting the Arctic and the actions that students can take to help to protect the environment.
“As part of this outreach work, we deliberately wanted to emphasize the ways in which racial injustice and environmental injustice are deeply intertwined for many communities in the Arctic,” said Dr. Mackie. “We hope that our post-doctoral work will contribute to the enhancement of racial, social and environmental justice in the Arctic and are grateful to the Arctic Initiative for giving us a platform from which to conduct this work.”
