| Description: Dr. Nicky Sheats, J.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Urban Environment at the John S. Watson Institute for Public Policy of Thomas Edison State College, will present "Climate Change and Environmental Justice" at 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9, in the Faculty Commons of the School of Law Center. The event is free and open to the public.
Dr. Sheats has defined the primary mission of the Center as providing support for New Jersey's environmental justice community. He has also been a member of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, New Jersey's only statewide environmental organization that focuses solely on environmental justice issues, since its inception in 2003. Among the issues he is working on are particulate matter air pollution, climate change, cumulative risk and impacts, the siting of schools on contaminated land, developing environmental justice legal strategies and increasing the capacity of the environmental justice community to address these and other issues. Sheats is also pursuing scientific research with several academic partners.
Sheats received his Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in the year 2000 where his field of study was biological oceanography and his specialty was stable isotope biogeochemistry. After graduating he worked for Environmental Defense as a science and law fellow, at The College of New Jersey as a visiting scholar and at the Earth Institute of Columbia University as a post-doctoral fellow.
Prior to studying science Sheats attended Harvard Law School and worked as a public interest attorney for almost eight years. He served as a law clerk for the Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (the equivalent of a state supreme court), a landlord-tenant and housing attorney at Camden Regional Legal Services, a public defender in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a legal instructor at a community legal education and college preparatory program in Harlem. | |
