New Leadership Team at NAPPS

The Northeastern University Association of Public Policy Students (NAPPS) has a new leadership team in Fall 2025 (pictured left to right): President Vartika Govil '26 (MPP), Vice President Vamini Jain '26 (MPA), and Secretary Jonathan Oubenslimane '26 (MPP). In Fall 2025, NAPPS is starting a Professor After Hours program, an informal mixer where Policy School faculty and students can connect on research, career paths, and collaboration opportunities.

Power Partnership Launches

The Policy School has teamed up with Northeastern's School of Law to launch the Northeastern Law and Policy Fellows program—an elite initiative that brings seasoned government leaders into our ecosystem to forge community, share hard-won expertise, and elevate scholarship through real-world insight. READ MORE

Fall 2025 Meet & Greet

On September 25th, the Policy School community came alive as students, faculty, and staff mingled, forged new connections, and kicked off the academic year with energy, purpose, and hope.

Decoding Climate's Legal Future

Profs. Sharmila Murthy (left) and Laura Kuhl (right) took center stage at a September 24th panel at Northeastern School of Law, dissecting the International Court of Justice's groundbreaking climate opinion and its potential to reshape climate litigation, international negotiations, and policy development worldwide.

Leaders in the Making

Policy School Director Maria Ivanova spoke at the September 12th-13th EAGLE (Emerging as Global Leaders Experience) Summit, co-hosted by the Policy School and held on Northeastern’s Arlington campus. Participants included Northeastern Law and Policy Fellows Nancy Johnson and Christine Stoneman, who served for many years as public service attorneys in the federal government.

Life Beyond Earth: The Biotech Frontier

Policy School faculty Mai'a Cross, Brian Helmuth, and Anncy Thresher are among the co-authors of a new report charting how biotechnology will unlock humanity's sustainable future among the stars. Their work champions international collaboration and ethical frameworks to ensure biotech innovation creates closed-loop life systems, thriving space habitats, and responsible stewardship of our cosmic expansion. READ MORE

Mapping Justice: Reclaiming Black Geographies

Prof. Cara Michell chaired the Aug 27th panel "Beyond the Cartesian Grid: Creative Black Geographies as Practices of Care" at the Royal Geographical Society's Annual International Conference. The session featured international scholars and artists examining how conventional Western mapping methods often erase Black spatial knowledge and experiences.  READ MORE

Geneva Gridlock, Global Momentum

At the Aug 5th-15th INC-5.2 plastics negotiations in Geneva, governments failed to agree on a global treaty, but Northeastern’s delegation — led by Prof. Maria Ivanova, and which included Prof. Aron Stubbins, Nicole Vandale, Olga Skaredina, Prof. Kirsten Rodine-Hardy, and Davis Bookhart —engaged UN officials, business leaders, NGOs, and US congressional staff to share an interdisciplinary vision for eliminating plastic pollution. READ MORE

Mapping Water's Future

On Aug 18th-19th, Prof. Damon Hall, and Marine and Environmental Sciences doctoral student Bryn Anderson, hosted the National Science Foundation-supported "Stakeholder-informed spatial modeling for hydrologic sciences" workshop in picturesque Nahant, MA—where data meets decision-making to chart the future of our water resources.

300 and Counting: Democratizing Civic Innovation

Prof. Kimberly D. Lucas's CivicXSyllabus just hit a major milestone—300+ curated resources and climbing. CivicXSyllabus seeks to democratize thought leadership in the civic innovation space by curating respected and high-quality civic innovation resources searchable by resource type and topic. VIEW THE PROJECT

Mapping Black Experience in the City of Light

Prof. Cara Michell was a 2024-2025 laureate and summer 2025 Artist in Residence at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. During her residency, Prof. Michell advanced her ongoing research into "Black Psychogeographies"—a practice that maps the emotional, experiential, and relational dimensions of how Black bodies navigate racialized space. READ MORE

Prof. Nishith Prakash Wins Three Prestigious Appointments

Prof. Nishith Prakash has received appointments at three distinguished academic organizations: the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), Nature Scientific Reports, and Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The appointments reflect his growing leadership across economics, science, and interdisciplinary scholarship. READ MORE

Tech Meets Ethics in Boston

BARI’s AI and Ethics educational outreach program What The Tech? (WTT?) returned in Spring and Summer 2025. The spring workshop tackled AI's promise and peril head-on, while the summer internship delved into how emerging technologies collide with open spaces and human rights across Boston—turning the city into a living laboratory for tech ethics. READ MORE

Climate Frontlines: Lessons from Bali

This summer, Prof. Nichola Minott led a group of students to Bali as part of a Dialogues of Civilizations course. In Bali, students witnessed both the stark realities of climate inequality and the creativity of grassroots adaptation. READ MORE

PhD Students Awarded Experiential Fellowships 

Olga Skaredina, Gerardo Gentil, Yimeng Yang, and Johan Arango-Quiroga have been awarded Fall 2025 CSSH Experiential Fellowship to support their research.

clockwise from top left: Olga, Gerardo, Yimeng, Johan

Voices Behind the Lens: Energy Justice Unveiled

PhD student Istiakh Ahmed and Prof. Laura Kuhl brought community voices to the forefront on September 17th at UMass Boston, unveiling the striking Photovoice exhibit "Energy equity, transitions, and futures: Photovoice insights from Latinx community members in Boston"—where every image tells a story of struggle, resilience, and the fight for energy justice. READ THE PROJECT PAPER

Fire, Fields, and Fairness

On Sep 13th, PhD alumna Gloria Schmitz presented her disaster resilience research carried out with Prof. Daniel Aldrich on the California wildfires at the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada. The presentation, entitled “A Geospatial and Quantitative Analysis of Agricultural Exemption Passes During the California Wildfires,” focused on businesses in the agricultural sectors of cannabis, commercial farms, orchards, ranches, and vineyards.

Women Who Change the Game

Policy School students Bella Wood '26 (MPP) (left) and Safiya Khalid '24 (MPP) (right) were receipients of Northeastern's 2025 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. Bella secured an Innovator Fellowship for "Ranch Lab"—transforming Western ranches into living laboratories where land stewardship meets economic innovation across generations. Safiya earned second place in Social Impact for her "Community Organizing Alliance (COA)"—a dynamic civic engagement platform that amplifies youth voices and turns community organizing into community power.

Double Agency, Double Impact

PhD student Stephane Labossiere maximized his Harvard Kennedy School  Rappaport Public Policy Summer Fellowship, strategically splitting his time between two key agencies—the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement (MOIA) and the Office for Refugees and Immigrants (ORI)—to tackle multiple high-impact projects advancing immigrant and refugee communities across Boston. READ MORE

Greek Life

In summer 2025, PhD student Kishan Narayn traveled to Greece to attend the Summer School in Advanced Economics, co-organized by the Department of Economics at the University of Ioannina and the University of Piraeus. This program brought together a small cohort of PhD students and young researchers from around the world to engage in intensive study of modern theoretical and empirical economics methods. READ MORE

Property, Power, and the Politics of Place

PhD alumnus Vivek Mishra '25 has published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. His article “Class, Property Rights and Citizenship: Affluent Informal Settlements and the Cultural Production of Property in Delhi” deepens our understanding of urban informality and how class mobilization shapes access to rights and services in cities of the Global South. READ THE ARTICLE

Mining the Future

PhD student Madeline Craig-Scheckman has been selected to join the Critical Minerals Development Lab at Resources for the Future, where she will collaborate with leading experts to address the challenges of sustainable critical mineral supply chains. She also co-authored a public commentary to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on U.S. critical minerals policy, contributing her expertise to shape national approaches to energy-critical materials

Academic Calling

Mohsin Khan,who successfully defended his PhD dissertation on Sep 29th, has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Politics, Law, and Society at East Central University in Oklahoma. Mohsin will be bringing his expertise to the classroom, teaching courses in socio-political science, research methods, and water resource policy. Congratulations, Mohsin!

Making a Difference from the Local to the Global