People

Law, Ethics & Animals Program
People

Douglas Kysar

Faculty Co-Director

Doug Kysar is Faculty Co-Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He was born and raised in Indiana. Under his mother’s guidance, he developed a love of reading and a love of the more-than-human world. Kysar later studied at Indiana University, where his two loves developed further with guidance from the great nature writer and teacher Scott Russell Sanders. After law school, Kysar began teaching at Cornell Law School and moved to Yale in 2008. Kysar’s work studies the way society utilizes laws and regulations to prevent, manage, and respond to threats of harm to life. He has had a particular focus on climate change law and policy for several years now because climate change will bring harm to life on an almost unimaginable scale.

Jonathan Lovvorn

Faculty Co-Director

Jonathan Lovvorn is Faculty Co-Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School, a Senior Research Scholar, and Lecturer in Law. Lovvorn’s teaching and scholarship focuses on the intersection of animal law, environmental law, and food policy, and the search for practical legal solutions that advance diverse public interest causes. Lovvorn and Professor Doug Kysar co-teach the Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law & Policy Lab, which provides a creative space for students, faculty, outside experts, and non-governmental organizations to devise and propagate novel legal and policy strategies to compel industrial animal agriculture to pay the uncounted and externalized costs these operations saddle upon animals, workers, communities, and the environment. He has taught courses on animal and environmental law at Harvard, Georgetown, and NYU law schools, and litigated extensively on behalf of animals and the environment. Lovvorn also serves Chief Counsel for Animal Protection Litigation for the Humane Society of the United States, and as a board member and/or legal advisor to other animal and environmental protection organizations. He holds an LL.M. in Environmental Law from Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College, and a J.D. from University of California Hastings College of the Law.

Viveca Morris

Executive Director and Research Scholar

Viveca Morris is the Executive Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School, a Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and a Lecturer in Law. She founded LEAP in partnership with Faculty Co-Directors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn in 2019. Her research investigates the impacts of big business on the environment and animals, including the role of multinational agribusinesses in the climate crisis, strategies to hold agribusinesses and associated actors accountable for their environmental impacts and externalized costs, and policy reforms needed to make agriculture more sustainable, humane, and resilient. She co-hosts and co-produces the Yale University podcast "When We Talk About Animals," which features in-depth interviews with leading thinkers on the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human. Morris received B.A., M.E.M. (Master of Environmental Management), and M.B.A. degrees from Yale University. Her writing on business and the environment has been published by The Los Angeles Times, The Hill, Politico, and other publications.

Daina Bray

Climate Change and Animal Agriculture Senior Litigation Fellow

Daina Bray is the Climate Change and Animal Agriculture Senior Litigation Fellow and Project Manager of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School and a Senior Research Scholar in Law. Daina has extensive animal law and litigation practice experience, and a sustained and pragmatic commitment to making a positive difference in the ways that we interact with non-human animals. She previously served as general counsel of the nonprofits Mercy for Animals and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and practiced with major international law firms in the areas of litigation and international arbitration. Daina is a co-chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) International Animal Law Committee, a past chair of the ABA TIPS Animal Law Committee, and a past chair of the Tennessee Bar Association Animal Law Section. Daina received a JD from Stanford Law School, a BA in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead scholar, a Fulbright scholarship for research in environmental education, and the 2021 ABA Excellence in the Advancement of Animal Law Award.

Laurie Sellars

Postgraduate Fellow

Laurie’s curiosity about the lives of nonhuman animals began in kindergarten when she decided that she wanted to train great white sharks. Before joining LEAP, Laurie received an M.A. in Animal Studies from New York University, where she conducted research on the representation of sharks in tourism activities, the ethics of xenotransplantation, and how the ongoing pandemic has impacted nonhuman animals. Prior to graduate school, Laurie worked as an analyst at an economic consulting firm, The Brattle Group, which provides expert economic testimony in litigation. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2015 with a degree in economics and political science.

Jennifer Skene

Co-host, When We Talk About Animals

Jennifer Skene is a Clinical Lecturer in Law with the Environmental Protection Clinic at Yale and the Natural Climate Solutions Policy Manager with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Canada Project. Her work focuses on policy advocacy around primary forest protection in the Canadian boreal and other Northern forests, forest carbon accounting and regulation, and Indigenous rights. Jennifer co-hosts the Yale University podcast “When We Talk About Animals,” through which she explores with guests the astonishing non-human world and the reflections, lessons, and insights it provides on our own humanity. She received a J.D. from Yale Law School and 2014 and holds a B.S. in Communication from Northwestern University.

LEAP Student Fellows (2022-2023)

Stuart Babcock

J.D. 2024

Stuart Babcock is a first year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. As a LEAP Fellow, he is broadly interested in advancing animal welfare in agricultural, scientific, and wild contexts. Before matriculating at Yale, Stuart attended Northwestern University, where he earned a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.M. in Music Theory, and Boston University, where he earned an M.A. in Neuroscience. Between stints in school, he worked as a software engineer and as a patent professional. In the animal space, Stuart has volunteered with Faunalytics, a data-driven animal advocacy non-profit, and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, a natural history museum with a focus on connecting Chicagoans to nature. He hopes to leverage his technical background as he continues to explore legal avenues to advance animal welfare.

Hannah Beath

M.P.H. 2023

Hannah Beath is a second-year Master of Public Health candidate in the Health Policy department with a concentration in Climate Change and Health. She is particularly interested in the intersection of health and climate policy and how to leverage communication strategies to increase support for policy intervention, particularly in the Southern United States and Southern Appalachia, where she is from. As a LEAP fellow, her research will explore the relationship between health co-benefits, environmental regulations, and animal rights through a policy lens.

Elinor Case-Pethica

J.D. 2023

Elinor is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. She received her undergraduate degree in studio art from Wesleyan University in 2017 and spent several years working in curation and contemporary art research prior to starting law school. Her introduction to the animal welfare and rights movement was through this curatorial lens, confronting issues of cultural expression and exchange in the Guggenheim’s Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition, which was widely critiqued for its inclusion of artworks that incorporated live animals. Elinor looks forward to investigating how human interactions with animals unsettle the perceived divide between the natural and the cultural, particularly as it pertains to farming and food systems.

Huangrui Chu

M.S. 2024

Huangrui Chu is a graduate student at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). He is currently the research assistant for the bird collision. As a LEAP fellow, he hopes to dig into this research to make yale a bird-friendly environment. Prior to Yale, he also joined the Bird Collision Project at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and visualize the bird collision data based on DKU’s campus map. Huangrui holds a bachelor's degree in data science from Duke Kunshan University.

Grace Engelman

J.D. 2025

Grace is a first year J.D. candidate. Prior to law school, she worked for a holistic public defense organization in New York City and assisted clients with the civil legal issues that resulted from their contact with the criminal legal and family regulatory systems. She received her BA in philosophy from Brown, where she studied alternatives to retributive punishment. As a LEAP fellow, she hopes to link her background in public defense to topics in animal law and policy. She is interested in the intersection between labor justice, environmental justice, and factory farm abolition.

Kristy Ferraro

Ph.D. (Forestry & Environmental Studies) 2024

Kristy is a fifth year Ph.D. student in the School of the Environment. Her dissertation work focuses on how large non-human mammals impact nutrient and carbon cycles, specifically in northern ecosystems. More broadly, she is interested in how humans think about and conceptualize non-human animals, and understating how conservation scientists use, and speak on behalf of, non-human animals. Kristy received a B.S. in Philosophy and Environmental Geoscience from Boston College and an M.Sc. in Earth and Environmental Science from Vanderbilt University.

Kevin Chen

J.D. 2023

Kevin is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He is broadly interested in issues at the intersection of environmental justice, political economy, and international security. As a LEAP Fellow, Kevin hopes to explore the role of animal law and policy in increasing corporate and government accountability for transnational environmental harms. Prior to law school, he worked as a research assistant at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he developed curricula and supported community-led research on nuclear contamination in the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Economics from Columbia University.

Ilaria Cimadori

Ph.D. 2027

Ilaria is a first year PhD student at the Yale School of the Environment. Her interest in animal protection motivated her master's thesis research project. In particular, she carried out a policy effectiveness assessment of four prominent conventions protecting biodiversity with African Elephants as a case study, analyzing data on African Elephants in four countries to see how effective these conventions were at protecting the population over the years. During her PhD, she would like to focus her research on new bio-technologies regulations and how they may impact animals and the environment. During her free time, she volunteers at the animal shelter of her hometown. She also has a background in languages and international relations.

Alice Courtright

S.T.M. Yale Divinity School 2023

Alice Courtright studies theology and literature at Yale Divinity School, with a particular interest in the environmental humanities. She received her BA from Yale in English literature and creative writing, and her MDiv from Sewanee’s School of Theology in Tennessee. After seminary, Alice served as an Episcopal priest in New Hampshire for five years. As a LEAP fellow, Alice will explore ideas around animals, suffering, motherhood, longing, and the environment in her poetry and prose.

Margaret Cyr-Ohngemach

J.D. / M.E.M. 2024

Margaret is a first year Joint Degree JD/MEM student at Yale School of the Environment and Pace Law School. Her professional interests include supply chain & grid decarbonization, circular economies, food/agricultural policies and ending cruel confinement. Her scholarly interests pertain to advancing and expediting rights of nature and rights of nonhumans in a generally anthropocentric society with a rapidly declining natural environment and ecological milieu. Margaret is engaged at YSE via the Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and at YLS through the Environmental Protection Clinic. Outside of school, Margaret enjoys hiking, yoga, trying new plant-based foods, skiing/snowboarding, and snuggling her two black cats.

Diego Ellis Soto

Ph.D. (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) 2024

Diego's work lies at the intersection of using emergent technology and satellite imagery to study ecology and conservation biology. His dissertation aims to understand how sudden changes in the environment can lead to drastic responses of wildlife across the globe and whether, in turn, we can learn about environmental change through a bird’s eye view of animals themselves. For this he primarily analyzes large amounts of animal data collected from GPS collars to link these with environmental variables. He is currently exploring whether we can use animal-collected meteorological information (collected through on-board sensors deployed on animals) to predict weather. Another chapter of his dissertation assesses whether extreme events – from heatwave events up to lockdowns occurring during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic -- lead to long-term changes in wildlife behavior across the world. More broadly, Diego has been interested in bringing the humanities and the sciences closer together for the past ten years. Specifically, Diego is interested in showcasing how technology allows us to see the world through the lens of animals themselves, from their individual movements, to the sounds animals make, to an animal music opera he is currently working on. He hopes that such artistic expression increases public appreciation on the beauty of animals in the wild and the dangers they face during their day to day voyages in response to increasing human pressures and warming climates. Diego’s work has been covered by numerous news outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, ABC News, the Spanish news outlet EFE, Yahoo News, and more. He received a B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Trier, a M.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Konstanz, and a M.Sc. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale.

Robin Happel

M.E.M. / J.D. 2023

Robin is a joint law student with Yale and Pace University. Previously, she worked with Earth Law Center supporting rights of nature language, and additionally served as a legal intern for the IUCN World Conservation Congress and as a member of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund. She is a signatory to the Youth for Nature Manifesto as part of the UN Environment Programme's Major Group of Children & Youth, and additionally certified in biodiversity law through UNEP and as a Protected Species Observer under BOEM. Before starting law school, she worked in a paleontology lab and as a research assistant for the Bronx Zoo.

Vivian Hawkinson

M.E.S.c. 2023

Vivian's current research uses agent-based models to examine how changes in habitat availability, connectivity, and livestock herding practices in the American West alter grey wolf, ungulate, and livestock spatial and behavioral patterns. The aim is to understand contingent landscape factors that predictively lead to or diminish carnivore-livestock conflict. As the grey wolf population continues to rebound and an increasing number of wolf packs establish home ranges across the Western United States, it will be necessary to understand what features on the landscape contribute to occurrences of conflict and what grazing practices livestock owners might implement to mitigate potential instances of predation. By contributing to this field of knowledge Vivian hope to ease financial burdens faced by livestock owners, encourage long-term, sustainable wildlife movement patterns, and assist in the recovery of the narrative surrounding grey wolves.

Sarah Hirschfield

J.D. 2025

Sarah Hirschfield is a J.D candidate at Yale Law School. She is interested in animal ethics, animal-welfare arguments for veganism, and impact investing. She received an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Sarah holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Princeton University, where she co-founded the Princeton Vegan Society.

A.J. Hudson

J.D. 2023

A. J. Hudson is a JD candidate at Yale Law School and a recent MESc graduate of the Yale School of the Environment (2019). Before law school, A.J. spent five years teaching and eventually helped to found a public high school in one of the most disenfranchised, polluted, and over-policed neighborhoods in New York City. His legal work at Yale Law School seeks to redefine and redirect the body of environmental law towards the objectives of human and non-human rights, the aims of the climate justice movement, and the pressing needs of the marginalized communities he has served through the establishment of environmental minimums which protect human and non-human interests in tandem. This is both a pedagogical and professional project that pushes environmental law curriculums toward asking uncomfortable questions about systemic inequality that has been ignored for decades and challenges environmental practitioners to examine the failures of the conservation movement for people of color.

Momoko Ishii

Ph.D. 2025 (Environmental Engineering)

Momoko Ishii is a first-year PhD student of Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. Her research foci include bio-based synthetic materials and CO2 utilization. She is interested in human-animal interactions and responsible ways to engage with non-human species.

Eui Young Kim

J.D. 2025

Eui Young is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. She has a B.A. in philosophy from Yale College. Her interests include effective altruism, factory farming, and plant-based meat. She worked at New Haven Legal Assistance before starting law school.

Rebecca Landau

J.D. 2024

Rebecca is a JD candidate at Yale Law School. As a LEAP fellow, she is interested in policy issues surrounding the human impact on biodiversity. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a legislative drafter for the South Carolina Senate. In this role, she drafted legislation related to various environmental policy issues, including animal law—from the illegal capture of wild reptiles to the study of microplastics in aquatic life. She holds a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina.

Emma Findlen LeBlanc

J.D. 2024

Emma is a first year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. She studies evolving legal formulations of personhood, especially their relation to rights, citizenship, standing, and property. She is interested in how strategies of restricting the legal personhood of historically excluded groups, such as non-white racial minorities and women, are deployed against nonhuman animals in ways that obscure the complex interdependence of structures of oppression. Emma earned her DPhil and MPhil in anthropology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and a BA in sociology from Brown. She is currently writing a book about poor forest communities in eastern Canada trying to live outside of and against capitalist moral structures. She focuses on the impact of industrial forestry on rural communities’ moral relationships with animals and trees. Previously, she worked as a senior researcher at the ACLU of Maine, where she focused on racial justice and bail reform.

Rosalyn Leban

J.D. 2024

Rosalyn is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School studying the intersections of environmental justice, economic justice, immigrant justice, and the criminal legal system. She is interested in exploring the impacts of capitalism and environmental racism on immigrant communities, indigenous communities, and communities of color. Prior to law school, Rosalyn worked with asylum-seekers and migrants in Guatemala, many of whom fled untenable environmental and economic conditions in their ancestral homelands. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from Mount Holyoke College.

Nina Leviten

J.D. 2023

Nina is a first-year student at Yale Law School. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley with B.A.s in Economics and Molecular and Cellular Biology and is particularly interested in public health and health policy. As a LEAP fellow, Nina is looking forward to investigating the intersection of health, the environment, and animal rights, particularly in the area of medical research.

Richard Li

Ph.D. (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) 2025

Richard is a Ph.D. candidate in Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. His research focuses on the spatial and temporal dynamics of biological invasions, and aims to use biodiversity data from global databases to inform and improve the monitoring of species invasions worldwide. Richard is additionally interested in the networks of social and ecological values that underpin conservation decisions around invasive species control and management, at the nexus of ethics, conservation science, and invasion ecology. Before coming to Yale, Richard completed his B.A. in Environmental Biology at Columbia University.

Natalie Makableh

M.P.H. 2023

Natalie is a MPH candidate at the Yale School of Public Health. She is especially interested in the societal, ethical, and public policy questions arising from the adoption of AI-driven technology in transforming healthcare. As a EMD student, Natalie has worked with the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics; where her research focuses on the benefits and ethical challenges posed by synthetic biology and artificial life, genomics, neuropharmacology, and artificial intelligence. As a LEAP Fellow, Natalie hopes to explore the use of AI to detect welfare deviations and avoid preventable animal suffering that takes place in biomedical research. Prior to Yale, Natalie spearheaded and advised numerous early-stage startups in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area on fundraising and scaleup. Natalie holds a MBA and B.S. in Neurobiology and Economics.

Chloe Medina

J.D. 2025

Chloe is a first year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. She is originally from Los Angeles and graduated from Columbia University last year. She is greatly interested in environmental justice and animal law reform, so she hopes to expand her knowledge of those fields while a LEAP Fellow. Animal protection, in particular, is very important to her, so she hopes to focus on that.

Tamara Mehta

M.P.H. 2023

Tamara is a first-year MPH student at the Yale School of Public Health. Her interests lie between the intersection of non-communicable disease, climate change, and the role animal agriculture plays in South Asian food systems. Tamara holds a B.A. in Human Biology from Pitzer College, where she concentrated in cross-cultural health.

Ian Miller

J.D. 2024

Ian is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He is interested in housing affordability, factory farm abolition, and air pollution as issues of environmental justice. As a LEAP fellow, he will explore factory farm expansion in the developing world. Ian holds a B.A. in Philosophy, History, and South Asian studies from Stanford University. In 2019-2020, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar based at the Supreme Court of India and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Elijah Olson

J.D. 2023

Elijah is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School focusing on environmental and animal law. He grew up working on his family’s bison conservation ranch where he came to recognize the detrimental impacts of animal agriculture on topsoil and native plants. As a LEAP Fellow, Elijah hopes to explore the ways in which soil regeneration, species and habitat conservation, and rewilding can be supported by ending the exploitation of farmed animals. Elijah holds a B.S. in Economics from Brigham Young University.

Caroline Parker

J.D. 2023

Caroline is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. As a LEAP fellow, she hopes to highlight the connection between contemporary capitalism and exploitation in animal agriculture. As a law student, Caroline has worked with the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment; New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and the Law and Political Economy Project. Prior to law school, Caroline worked with the Colorado General Assembly. She believes that state and local governments should play an important role in advancing just climate, land use, and food policy. Caroline holds a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of the Virginia.

Varshini Parthasarathy

J.D. 2023

Varshini is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School interested in the intersection of climate change, water management, and environmental health. As a LEAP fellow, she hopes to explore the implications of climate change to local communities and biodiversity. Prior to law school, she worked for New York State focused on clean energy and sustainable infrastructure investment. Varshini holds a B.S. in Earth and Environmental Engineering from Columbia University.

Jonathan Perez-Reyzin

J.D. 2024

Jonathan is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He is especially interested in questions about animals at the intersection of law and philosophy, including issues regarding the relationship between animals’ consciousness and their legal status. While completing his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Harvard, he served as Editor-In-Chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy, where he oversaw the publication of an issue entirely dedicated to philosophical work on animals. In addition to his commitment to working towards greater legal and political support for the ethical treatment of animals, he also has interests in drug policy reform, criminal legal system reform, and environmental justice, and hopes to think more about the common philosophical commitments which underpin these various legal movements.

Thomas Poston

J.D. 2024

Thomas Poston is a second-year J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. A native of eastern North Carolina, Thomas studied politics, international affairs, and economics at Wake Forest University. He has a particular interest in the legal frameworks governing international trade and development, environmental degradation, and human and non-human animal exploitation, which he explored during a Fulbright research fellowship in Cambodia. Thomas has previously worked with a variety of public-service institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Department of State, and the Inter-American Development Bank. He is a Ludwig Program Fellow at the Law School and a 2022-2023 Emerging Scholar Fellow with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy.

Philine Qian

J.D. 2024

Philine is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. She is committed to social movement building for a more just future and seeks to address the harmful impact of industrial animal agriculture on environmental justice communities in her academic and professional endeavors. Prior to law school, Philine worked at Greenpeace Belgium and was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in Los Angeles. She received her B.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Southern California.

Alix Rachman

M.P.H. 2023

Alix is a second-year MPH student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, specializing in Climate Change and Health. Her academic interests include understanding the impacts of climate change on human, environmental, and wildlife health. Specifically, she is interested in the implications of climate change on agricultural practices, farmworker rights, and resources including livestock, fisheries, and crops. Prior to Yale, Alix worked as a biologist for ICF International, Inc. where she worked to implement environmental mitigation regulations and protect sensitive natural resources on urban development and energy-related projects. Alix graduated from California State University, Monterey Bay in 2017 with a BS in Environmental Science, Technology, and Policy and a concentration in Watershed Systems.

Steffen Seitz

J.D. 2023

Steffen Seitz is a third-year JD candidate at Yale Law School. As a LEAP fellow, he is primarily interested in the intersection of animal law and criminal law. He has spent the past year helping defend animal activists facing felony charges for conducting “open rescues” at factory farms. Steffen holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton University.

Nathalie Sommer

Ph.D. (School of the Environment) 2024

Nat is a second year Ph.D. student in the Yale School of the Environment. She works with terrestrial arthropods to understand how evolutionary processes within food webs affect nutrient cycling under climate change. Her previous research has focused on how consistent individual differences in animal behavior (aka animal personality) drives trophic cascades. Nat is broadly interested in the gamut of environmental ethics and the consequences of anthropocentrism on wildlife management. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Environmental Science from the College of William & Mary and a M.E.Sc. from the Yale School of the Environment.

Zack Steigerwald Schnall

M.E.M. 2023

Zack is a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). He is interested in the structural mechanisms by which inequality is legitimized and reproduced, as well as best approaches to redress it. As a LEAP fellow, he hopes to extend this research to interspecies justice and improve representation for nonhuman species. Prior to Yale, he spearheaded and advised numerous projects in the Greater Boston area focused on strengthening youth voices through critical thinking and civic action. Zack holds an AB in Sociology from Harvard College, where he studied the role of dress in youth boundary work.

Lindsay Stern

LEAP Podcast Co-Founder

Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) 2023

Lindsay is the author of two novellas and one novel, The Study of Animal Languages (Viking/Penguin). After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, she taught and wrote in Phnom Penh, Cape Town, and Cuzco on a Watson Fellowship before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and won the Taylor-Chehak prize in fiction. The co-founder and co-host of the Yale University podcast "When We Talk About Animals," she has received a FLAS fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Amy Award in poetry from Poets & Writers, and a Franke Fellowship from Yale, where she is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including PANK, DIAGRAM, and Smithsonian Magazine.

Aneri Suthar

M.P.H. 2023

Aneri is a second year M.P.H. student in the Health Policy department at YSPH. Her academic interests include reproductive justice, environmental health, pharmaceutical industry regulation, and healthcare system reform overall. She is ultimately aiming towards a career at the intersections of health, law, and policy. She graduated in 2020 from UCLA where she studied Human Biology and Society and International Development Studies, before serving as a Judicial Fellow in the California court system for a year. As a lifelong vegetarian/pescatarian, Aneri has often grappled with the ethical and moral questions that humanity’s treatment of other animals raises. As a LEAP Fellow, she is looking forward to exploring these further and learning more about multidisciplinary opportunities to “think-and-do” positive legal and political change in the realm of animal welfare, especially mitigating the impacts of industrialized animal agriculture.

Steph Tan

M.P.H. 2023

Steph Tan is a second-year Master of Public Health Candidate at the Yale School of Public Health. After being born and raised in New Zealand, then studying Nutritional Sciences and Dietetics at Cornell University ('19), Steph developed a great appreciation for the outdoors, marine conservation, and food security policies. A priority for Steph is banning the captivity of dolphins and other cetaceans. She is also interested in broader animal rights issues, and mitigating environmental degradation imposed by factory farming and overfishing.

Quynhanh Tran

J.D. 2024

Quynhanh is a second-year student at Yale Law School. Prior to law school, she served as District Director for a member of the Texas House of Representatives, where she led the office’s environmental policy agenda. As a LEAP fellow, she hopes to explore how local governments can leverage their power to protect animals and the environment. She holds a B.A. in Plan II Honors and Economics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Aaron Troncoso

J.D. / M.E.M. 2023

Aaron is an aspiring environmental advocate originally from New York City. A recent graduate of Yale College, he is currently pursuing a dual J.D. and Master of Environmental Management at Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Before returning to Yale, he worked to help communities around Massachusetts prepare for the impacts of climate change at the grassroots nonprofit Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW). Aaron is also passionate about landscape, wildlife, and ecosystem conservation. For his senior thesis project in environmental studies, he hiked ~1,100 miles along the Appalachian Trail from West Virginia to Maine, studying how increases in use affected the trail’s ecology and social dynamics. As a LEAP Student Fellow, he hopes to learn more about innovative legal and policy techniques that can be used to address critical environmental issues.

Kathleen Voight

M.E.Sc. 2024

Kathleen Voight is a Master of Environmental Science candidate interested in agricultural land and rural communities in the Rocky Mountain West. Kathleen is passionate about agricultural systems that improve ecological health, economic viability, and animal welfare. Her research focuses on resiliency and drought adaptation in crop production and livestock grazing in southern Colorado. Prior to coming to the Yale School of the Environment, Kathleen worked in environmental education and in agriculture, growing diversified vegetables and raising pastured livestock. Kathleen holds a BA in History of Art from Yale University and she is a current Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Fellow. In her free time, Kathleen likes to bike, hike, and ski as often as possible.

Alice Yiqian Wang

J.D. 2023

Alice Yiqian Wang is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research is broadly concerned with immigration and citizenship policy in the United States and Europe. Some of her current projects focus on the dynamics of judicial decision-making in deportation and asylum proceedings, political control over the U.S. immigration courts, and racial bias in policing. As a LEAP fellow, she will engage with questions of worker safety in the meatpacking and agricultural industries, especially as they relate to the patterns of exploitation experienced by immigrants and foreign guest workers. Alice holds a M.A. in Political and Legal Theory from the University of Warwick, which she attended on a US-UK Fulbright scholarship. She received her B.A. in Philosophy and B.A. in Government from Smith College.

Maggie Wang

J.D. 2025

Maggie is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. As a LEAP fellow, she is especially interested in food systems and sovereignty, urban ecology, and conservation. She holds a BA in history and economics from the University of Oxford.

Zeyu (Jeffrey) Wang

M.A.M. 2023

Jeffrey is currently a Master of Advanced Management student at Yale School of Management. He recently completed his MBA study at Cambridge Judge Business School and did summer internship at Cambridge Capital Group, where he advised angel investment in Europe’s leading tech cluster. Throughout his career, he has dealt with global clients by providing financial solutions and earned extensive international investment experiences in renewable energy, mining, natural resources, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Jeffrey graduated from University of Cambridge with a MPhil degree. At LEAP, he is now working on green finance and impact investment.

Alisa White

J.D. / M.E.Sc. 2023

Alisa is a dual degree student at Yale Law School and Yale School of the Environment. As a LEAP Fellow, she hopes to further explore the intersection of climate change mitigation and adaptation, community-based forest protection, Indigenous rights, and animal agriculture in Latin America. She is also passionate about food systems resilience and corporate accountability in industrial agriculture. Prior to law school, she researched community-based forest management in Oaxaca, Mexico and analyzed the global impacts of climate change as an environmental consultant in Boston, Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Economics from Dartmouth College.

Quincy Yangh

M.E.M. 2024

Quincy Yangh (he/him) is a Master of Environmental Management Candidate at Yale School of Environment. Guided by his upbringing as a child of Hmong refugees, he centers his life’s work on indigenous and cultural resurgence within diaspora communities. In this work, he aims to magnify the strength of these communities and co-create environmental solutions that center ecological, cultural, and spiritual vitality. As a LEAP Fellow, Quincy will explore the ancestral kinship/relationship between animals and the Hmong Shaman community. In doing so, he hopes to illuminate an alternative, kin-centered, human-animal ethic that his people have practiced since times immemorial.

Yiheng Zhou

M.S. (Health Informatics) 2023

Yiheng Zhou is a second year master student in Health Informatics at Yale. She is broadly interested in investigating the human-animal relations under climate change. Her previous research has focused on the application of spatial analysis and modeling techniques for wildlife monitoring, disease surveillance and disaster management. As a LEAP fellow, Yiheng hopes to explore how laws and policies can support biodiversity conservation and improve animal welfare. She holds a B.S. in Geographic Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Undergraduate Affiliates (2022-2023)

Daniel Blokh

Assistant Podcast Producer

B.A. 2024 (Undeclared)

Daniel Blokh is a 19 year old Russian-Jewish poet based in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a 2018 National Student Poet and is the author of In Migration (BAM! Publishing 2016), Holding Myself Hostage In The Kitchen (Lit City Press 2017), and Grimmening (Diode Editions, 2018). As an Assistant Podcast Producer on Yale University podcast "When We Talk About Animals," he edits podcast audio, manages the blog and newsletter, and helps with anything else the hosts need him to. He's a rising sophomore at Yale and probably majoring in English, but please email him at blokhdaniel@gmail.com if you have any other ideas.

Past LEAP Student Fellows

2021-2022

Anya Allen

J.D. 2022

Anya is a second year student at Yale Law School. After graduating with a B.A. in Russian and Philosophy from Wellesley College, she obtained her M.A. and M.Phil. at Yale University, where she studied Slavic Languages and Literatures with a Minor Field in Ecocriticism. As a graduate student, she researched animal ethics in nineteenth-century Russian literature and political philosophy. As a LEAP fellow, she is interested in exploring human-animal relationships through the lens of law and literature, as well as conducting research on First Amendment challenges to ag-gag laws.

Stuart Babcock

J.D. 2024

Sarah Baldinger

J.D. 2022

Sarah is currently pursuing a J.D. at Yale Law School and is focusing her studies on renewable energy and environmental law. She is also passionate about marine conservation and protecting ocean life. Before attending Yale, Sarah was a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group for three years in Washington, D.C. and worked primarily on Energy, Public Sector and Industrial Goods projects. Sarah has a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in Political Science from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Sarah’s undergraduate thesis (“Lost and Won: A New Empirical Analysis of Economic Power Sharing”) focused on natural resources from a political perspective, by exploring the importance of sharing control over resources and other forms of “economic power” to resolve civil conflict.

Polina Bochenkova

M.M.S. 2022

Polina Bochnekova is a graduate student at the Yale School of Management. She obtained her first graduate degree at the HEC Paris in France and a Bachelor degree at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. In between her studies, she worked in the public and private sector on sustainable agriculture, circular economy, waste management and plastic pollution, and researched corruption in the Russian banking system. Her academic interests lie in the intersection of business, policy and environment preservation, and she is also engaged in animal studies issues. At LEAP, she wants to explore the evolution of plant-based economies, challenges and opportunities in farmed animal sanctuaries, and the representation of non-human animals in arts.