Postdoctoral fellows build research and community connections

Elsie Carrillo first encountered semi-aquatic snakes not as a scientist but as a middle-school teacher participating in a Stanford summer research program. Her experience as a teacher shapes both her work on garter snakes in California’s agricultural waterways and the way she mentors the next generation of scientists.

In 2025, she was one of three postdoctoral fellows admitted to a program at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability that aims to recruit researchers who demonstrate excellence in scholarship and show leadership by engaging with the scientific community through mentorship, teaching, and fostering a welcoming research culture. The Dean’s Sustainability Leaders Postdoctoral Fellowship supports participants for two years to work in Earth, oceans, energy, civil and environmental engineering, and emerging fields under the umbrella of sustainability.

Together with Carrillo, the three fellows represent a breadth of research areas at the school: Ekaterina Landgren uses mathematical models to better understand people’s perspectives on climate change, and Jessica Orozco explores how plants survive world-changing disturbances. As postdoctoral researchers in different departments, they are interacting with both graduate and undergraduate researchers in the lab and field.

“We want them to not only hit the ground running and be impactful with their research, but also engage with our community and the next generation of scientists in sustainability,” said Lupe Carrillo, assistant dean of access, belonging, and community at the Doerr School of Sustainability.

Since arriving at Stanford in October 2025 as the program’s 2025-27 cohort of fellows, Elsie Carrillo, Landgren, and Orozco have been doing exactly that. 

The program, which began in 2021, supports the fellows’ growth as a cohort and as researchers who can make connections across disciplines and are leaders in creating opportunities for the next generation. “There are a lot of intellectual hubs for them to connect with and to seek out even more interesting research questions,” Lupe Carrillo said. “They have the potential to make a difference within many different communities.”

It also seeks to attract a broad pool of talent to complement those who reached academia through more traditional pathways.

“It’s so important to create many avenues of access into postdoc programs and the professoriate,” she said. “This could have ripple effects as the fellows pay it forward in terms of how they mentor and how they create environments that are amenable and welcoming to many different perspectives.”

Studying snakes, shepherding students

When Elsie Carrillo was a middle-school science teacher in East San José in 2018, she participated in an Ignited summer research program at Stanford for educators that introduced her to the study of semi-aquatic snakes. Her fascination with how these often misunderstood creatures adapt to their watery environments led her to pursue a PhD soon after at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with mentorship from ecologist and evolutionary biologist Rita Mehta.

Now, she is working with Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor of oceans, to study how garter snakes interact with irrigation canals and croplands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and determine if there is a correlation between crop yields and populations of snakes and other wildlife.

She applied for the Sustainability Leaders Postdoctoral Fellowship Program to collaborate with Doerr School of Sustainability faculty who study ecosystem biodiversity because, she said, “I know the school has the resources and expertise to help me in answering these questions.”

Carrillo was also excited that the program connects fellows with mentoring opportunities through programs such as the Sustainability Undergraduate Research in Geoscience and Engineering Program, or SURGE, which is open to U.S. college undergraduates who are new to research. She wants to help students experience pivotal moments like she did through Ignited and her undergraduate research at UC Berkeley, she said. 

“It’s great to see students develop their scientific identities, and I want to be able to foster that and share what I know,” she said. “We can learn a lot from students, too. They have really original, creative ideas, and it’s a great perspective to gain.”

The social dynamics of understanding climate

Landgren describes herself as “one of those people who can get excited about a lot of different ideas.” 

In her PhD research at Cornell University, she studied complex social systems and the atmospheric dynamics of exoplanets. In her first postdoctoral position at the University of Colorado Boulder, she began working with and developing mathematical models to explore the complex social systems that underlie how people think about climate.

At the Doerr School of Sustainability, Landgren is working with Assistant Professors Sara Constantino and Madalina Vlasceanu in the Environmental Social Sciences Department – an ideal place to unite her interests in climate, math, and social systems, she said.

Her research examines how people form beliefs about climate change and how institutional signals, such as Supreme Court decisions, can affect perceptions of climate solutions.

“Environmental social scientists are thinking about how to convince people to take action on climate, whether it’s individual or collective,” she says. “That, combined with the community, really drew me to the field.”

A pathway to plants and academia

Orozco, who was a first-generation college student, knew she wanted to study biology as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, but she wasn’t sure what subfield to focus on. Through classes and internships, she discovered her enthusiasm for plant biology.

“My dad’s a landscaper, so I’ve always had plants in my life – we have a gazillion plants, but I’d never thought about researching them,” she said.

Her PhD research at UC Davis focused primarily on the effects of wildfire smoke on orchard trees. After working to understand how plants endure one kind of catastrophe, she transitioned to another after finding inspiration in a podcast episode on the extinction event that wiped out many dinosaurs. Her current project with Kevin Boyce, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences, involves analyzing plant survival on a planetary scale.

She’s now assessing global data about modern plants to identify traits that allow them to survive disturbances as enormous as that extinction event.

In addition to her research, she said, the most exciting aspect of the fellowship program has been the chance to learn skills that will help her pursue a faculty role, such as designing courses and managing a lab.

“I’m entering this world that I feel like students are not really prepared for sometimes after a PhD program,” Orozco said.

As Orozco and her colleagues continue to delve into their research, they also are giving back to their fields. “They are bringing their passion to making academia more accessible and welcoming, and they are role models for many in the scientific community,” Lupe Carrillo said.