Erika Svendsen

Dr. Erika Svendsen serves as Program Director for the Yale Urban Climate Leadership Certificate Program, bringing decades of experience connecting environmental stewardship with recovery and social resilience. Erika is a Research Social Scientist with 20+ years of service with the US Forest Service and was the team lead for the agency's ground-breaking NYC Urban Field Station. One of her first research projects was to document the "resonating power" of trees to aid in the recovery of communities in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 — work that produced a national registry of more than 600 living memorial sites, the field study Land-Markings: 12 Journeys through 9/11 Living Memorials, and scholarship on memorials as memory work and as indicators of social resilience, recognized with the Environmental Design Research Association's Award for Research and the National Award for Preserving 9/11. Her science-practice work has centered on environmental stewardship as a form of governance and self-reliance, and on care for living things as a catalyst for community well-being and collective action.  Prior to her work with the YSE and the Forest Service, Erika served as the Director of NYC Parks' GreenThumb program and as a fellowship coordinator for The Rockefeller Foundation. Erika has an MES from YSE and a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning.