LEAP Announces Six Student Grant Program Recipients for 2025

The Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School has announced the recipients of its annual Student Grant Program for 2025. Chosen from an exceptionally competitive applicant pool, six students from across Yale are undertaking projects that build understanding of, draw attention to, and/or develop new strategies to address the urgent threats facing nonhuman animals. This year’s set of awards will support multidisciplinary projects in conservation politics and governance, religious interpretations of animal ethics, corrective environmental history, photography, and science-driven visual art. The 2025 LEAP Student Grant recipients include:

Julius Bronola

Julius Bronola is a Master of Environmental Science student at Yale School of the Environment from Los Angeles. As a researcher, he is interested in understanding the material culture and political ecology of objects and commodities involved in the illegal wildlife trade, particularly in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Bronola’s LEAP Student Grant project will study critically endangered giant clams, whose overharvesting across the Indo-Pacific is driving conservation concerns and prompting international and national regulatory measures. 

Bronola will examine how the giant clam trade and conservation governance unfold in Balabac, Palawan, Philippines — an area marked by high volumes of illegal trade seizures and proximity to disputed waters in the South China/West Philippine Sea. Drawing on Foucauldian power theory, actor-network theory, and critical geopolitics, his study will map the formal and informal networks shaping giant clam trade and conservation and the forms of governance that emerge from these interactions. The study will also understand how local fishers, traders, and communities navigate and negotiate these emergent forms of governance. In addition, it will explore how domestic conservation governance intersects with geopolitical maritime conflicts between China and the Philippines.

Emily Brookfield

Emily Brookfield is a second-year Master of Divinity candidate at Yale Divinity School. Her work considers how value systems impact individuals’ perception and treatment of nonhuman persons. With her LEAP Student Grant, Emily will consider the ethics and legality of animal sacrifice, with a particular focus on the Kapparot ritual. She will interview participants from the Orthodox Jewish community, Jewish faith leaders who disagree with the practice, as well as animal advocates who raise legal complaints about the practice. Brookfield will also consider how the public nature of the sacrifice impacts the relationship between certain animal advocates and the ritual’s participants. She aims to promote consideration of how to form allyship across groups of different beliefs and how animals are and should be present in various faiths.

Sarina Fereydooni

Sarina Fereydooni is a junior at Yale College majoring in Political Science and pursuing a certificate in Global Health. Her academic and advocacy work explore the intersection of legal systems, public health, and culturally responsive policymaking. Her LEAP Student Grant project investigates how various interpretations of Islamic animal ethics — particularly the concept of ritual purity — influence public health and legal responses to animal populations. Centering Turkey’s recent legislation regarding stray dogs, the study examines how religious doctrines intersect with public health imperatives, such as disease prevention and community well-being, in the formation of law. Islamic texts contain guidance on both compassionate treatment of animals and ritual cleanliness, but interpretations vary widely across legal schools and cultural contexts. This research combines ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with legal scholars, health professionals, and nonprofit organizations in Turkey, alongside a comparative analysis of similar debates in other countries.

Charlotte Leib

Charlotte Leib is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University. Her project, “The oil-covered bird: the New Jersey Meadowlands and the untold story of late-nineteenth-century biodiversity loss,” will trace the early history of how oil pollution affected bird life in and around the New Jersey Meadowlands during the ascent of the area's initial oil economy. Ornithologists and conservationists in the 19th century generally pointed to three key causes for declining bird populations in the Northeast: seasonal hunting activity, demand for bird feathers in the millinery trade, and habitat loss. Other conservationists harboring racialized sentiments blamed poor white and non-white, immigrant populations for contributing to decline of bird populations in the United States during this period. However, oil pollution was not widely recognized as a threat to birds until the 1920s. 

With her project, which is one subtopic within her dissertation, Leib will set the story straight by clarifying how oil and its associated infrastructures debilitated birds in the Newark Bay, New York Harbor, and New Jersey Meadowlands-area during the ascent of the area’s oil trade in the early 1880’s through 1920s. She will use the support of a LEAP Grant to conduct archival research, meet with local expert ornithologists, and make site visits to her main area of study for her dissertation, the New Jersey Meadowlands.

David Rosenbloom

David Rosenbloom is a Yale College senior studying philosophy, interested in both the theory and practice of interspecies flourishing. An aspiring journalist and photographer, Rosenbloom's project – "Animals, in Plain Sight" – explores animal sentience and individuality through photography. By telling the stories of animals, specifically farmed animals, that are often rendered invisible in our industrialized food system, David seeks to encourage new modes of thinking about the human-animal relationship. The project will culminate in an exhibition of David’s work and a corresponding photo essay.

Shubhi Sharma

Shubhi Sharma is a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology whose research integrates machine learning with biodiversity science. She is also a visual artist, and her LEAP Student Grant will support her exhibition Habitat Shared, which bridges scientific inquiry and visual storytelling to explore the often-overlooked relationships between humans and other species. Through large-scale, hyperrealistic drawings inspired by ecological research and the Yale Peabody Museum’s collections, the project documents real examples of coexistence, adaptation, and loss. Each piece is grounded in evidence, revealing how animals respond to the environments we shape, from a crow’s nest woven with copper wire to butterflies collected for their beauty. Habitat Shared invites viewers to pause, look closely, and reflect on how we share space with the species around us.

Read more about the 2024 cohort, 2023 cohort, 2022 cohort and 2021 cohort of LEAP Student Grantees and learn more about the LEAP Student Grant Program on LEAP’s website.