The Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University accelerates solutions to critical energy and environmental challenges, advancing a more just, resilient, and sustainable world.
The Nicholas Institute conducts and supports actionable research and undertakes sustained engagement with policymakers, businesses, and communities—in addition to delivering transformative educational experiences to empower future leaders. The Nicholas Institute’s work is aligned with the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations, and external engagement missions to address climate challenges.
Julee Snyder is a policy associate with the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. Snyder received her master’s degree in public health from George Washington University’s Milken Institute and her bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a music minor from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her master’s research focused on environmental epidemiology, specifically the impact of climate on public health.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers: An intimate tale about a family’s reckoning with loss. Powers is a powerful science writer who manages to lull the reader into a glorious state of bliss that one knows, through the power of the narrative arc, will end. It creates an appropriately heart-wrenching tension that captures the value of our work on climate and ecosystem protections at the Institute.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson: An epic piece of scholarship detailing the US Great Migration post-reconstruction (1940s-1960s). Wilkerson captures the lived experiences of three individuals who embody three migratory patterns over three different decades, and then contextualizes their stories into the larger historical events that include Jim Crow, the Green Book, urban race riots, the rise and fall of Martin Luther King Jr., white flight, and redlining.
