Neda Ibrahim

Neda Ibrahim is a second-year student at UCI working toward a Biological sciences degree with an emphasis in ecology. Through learning about ecology, she was introduced to the connections between ecological and social issues. As she got more involved with BioSci at UCI, she realized that it could operate in a vacuum and that it lacked diverse solutions and approaches. Neda finds that an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges the intersections between climate change, racism, and social injustice is crucial to lasting change. She is passionate about environmental justice and is working with UCI Community Resilience Projects to align UCI’s sustainability-related activities to UCI’s activities that focus on social justice.

Neda works to integrate and align UCI’s sustainability and climate activities with UCI’s wide-ranging activities that forward understanding and progress on racial and social justice. She supports the UC-wide efforts to integrate social equity into the work of the UC Sustainability Steering Committee and the UC President’s Global Climate Leadership Council. At UCI, this work includes involvement in UCI’s Community Resilience Co-Lab. The student-led Co-lab aims to build a stronger campus community response to the enduring and intersecting crises of environmental, racial, and social injustice. It brings together UCI graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, and staff from across disciplines and departments to co-generate critical and collaborative shared space for community, experimentation, skills-sharing, and action. Neda works with staff and faculty mentors from the Co-lab to plan and carry out AY 19-20 fellowship activities to continue to weave together students, faculty, and staff working at the intersection of these issues.