LEAP Announces Seven Student Grant Program Recipients for 2026

The Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School announced seven recipients of the 2026–2027 LEAP Student Grant. 

Chosen from a competitive applicant pool, these students from across Yale are undertaking projects that build understanding of, draw attention to, and/or develop new strategies to address threats facing nonhuman animals. The 2026 LEAP Student Grant projects and recipients are described below.

Where Forest Meets Farm: Silvopasture’s Potential to Change Animal Agriculture

Emily Aikens

Emily Aikens is a senior at Yale College, majoring in English and pursuing a certificate in Food, Agriculture, and Climate Change. Her academic work explores sustainable agriculture and representations of animal consciousness in literature. With support from a LEAP Student Grant, she will travel to Wisconsin to produce a documentary on silvopasture—an agroforestry practice that integrates livestock, forage, and trees within a single system. Through interviews with farmers and academic experts, the film will examine the environmental and animal welfare benefits of this approach, with particular attention to the embodied differences animals experience in silvopasture systems versus industrial farms.

Nocturnal Monitoring of Avian Migration over Yale

Julien Amsellem, Justin Leahy, and Owen Robertson

During peak migration, more than 1 billion birds can be on the move in a single night across the United States. In the last few decades, small-scale concerted efforts have attempted to map the array of species performing nocturnal migration, zeroing in on diagnostic night flight calls (NFCs) to identify hundreds of species as they cross continents and oceans. Julien Amsellem, Justin Leahy, and Owen Robertson will build on these efforts by recording NFCs from elevated roofs across New Haven, thereby allowing for the first comprehensive analysis of nocturnal migration in the immediate region. This dataset will contribute to a global understanding of nocturnal migration and NFC variability, with the potential to document endangered and unknown migrants in Connecticut and further their conservation. The project is a collaboration of the following three Yale College students.

Julien Amsellem is a rising senior studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology with a concentration in Biodiversity & the Environment. He fell in love with birds at age 6 and has since developed a lifelong fascination with large-scale migration, taxonomic mysteries, and highly localized endemic taxa. He works as an undergraduate researcher in Yale’s Prum and Queenborough labs, where he focuses on phylogenetics and ornithophily, respectively. 

Justin Leahy is a rising sophomore studying Environmental Studies and Ethics, Politics, & Economics and has been an avid birder since his fifth birthday. Leahy is a co-author of a peer-reviewed study on invasive red-vented bulbuls in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology and an undergraduate researcher in the Prum Lab. Leahy is fascinated by the intersection of avian ecology and conservation policy and the sheer audacity of 1 billion birds moving invisibly over our heads every night, and he hopes this project will shed light on what’s actually passing over New Haven and what we might be missing. 

Owen Robertson is a rising sophomore majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology and has been a birder for longer than he can remember. Robertson is especially interested in cryptic speciation, bird vocalizations, and the interplay between geography and avian populations. A dedicated Yale campus birder, he is excited about exploring the hidden world of nocturnal migration unfolding over New Haven.

From Arboviruses to Armadillos: A Multispecies History of Zoonotic Disease

Lauren Killingsworth

Lauren Killingsworth is an M.D.-Ph.D. student in the history of science and medicine. Her research lies at the intersection of the history of medicine, global health, and the environment. Her dissertation examines how international organizations in the mid 20th century looked to specific geographies and natural ecosystems to understand the effect of the changing environment on disease. Thanks to the LEAP program, she will be pursuing her project “From Arboviruses to Armadillos: A Multispecies History of Zoonotic Disease.” This project looks at the how animals have been understood as both reservoirs of zoonotic diseases and sources of biological materials critical for infectious disease research and will take her to the WHO, the Rockefeller Foundation archives, and the National Library of Medicine to conduct research.  

The Ordinary Public Meaning of Farm Exemptions to State Animal Cruelty Laws

Adam Lerner

Adam Lerner ’28 is a J.D. student at Yale Law School. Before law school, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and held positions at NYU, Princeton, and Rutgers. Supported by a LEAP Student Grant, he will examine the assumptions underlying the language in state animal cruelty laws. Every U.S. state has a law banning cruelty to animals. Most of these laws include exemptions for certain practices related to farming animals: those that are “commonly accepted,” “acceptable,” “customary,” and “normal.” Received wisdom assumes that these exemptions allow the farming industry to define animal cruelty for itself. This project examines that assumption using the tools of legislative history and experimental jurisprudence.

Under the Urban Sun: Installation and Photography on Animals and Heat in Cities

Shuhe Wang

Shuhe Wang is a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, as well as a startup co-founder and a visual artist. Her interdisciplinary work connects urban studies, environmental humanities, and climate science, exploring how extreme heat reshapes the material and experiential textures of contemporary cities. Wang is interested in how knowledge is produced, translated, and felt. Drawing on methods like microclimate analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, podcasting, film-making, and entrepreneurial practice, she seeks to move climate discourse beyond abstraction toward embodied and ethically engaged forms of understanding.

Her LEAP Student Grant project, “Under the Urban Sun,” extends this inquiry to a multi-species perspective. Through installation and photographic work, this project traces how animals inhabit and survive within overheated urban environments, revealing the city as a shared thermal field shaped by exposure, adaptation, and disappearance. The project challenges human-centered climate narratives and repositions nonhuman life within the ethical and political discourse of environmental concern. Her work will culminate in a curated summer exhibition integrating sound, image, and spatial storytelling into an immersive and reflective public experience.