I am a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering, researching climate change and climate intervention. I have been organizing across campus since we elected to form CGSU-UE, and I am the current Vice President for Membership. During our contract negotiation, I led our Contract Action Team and co-facilitated our weekly meetings. Last semester, I helped establish a unified, credible strike threat, with over 1000 graduate workers pledging to strike within the first days of the pledge launch. Additionally, I worked to foster a more communicative and bottom-up organizer structure that brought new, excited, and capable people into our contract fight. In July, I was elected to lead our membership drive as VP for Membership. In just 2.5 months, our membership drive has resulted in over 600 new membership dues or agency fee payers.

In August, I attended and spoke at the UE National Convention. There, I connected with other UE locals and UE national leadership, and I attended workshops to learn techniques centered on protecting international workers. Additionally, in talking with delegates from sibling graduate worker unions and in reading the “A Green New Deal for People and the Planet” resolution, I realized that there were likely hundreds of UE climate scientists across all of the UE locals. If we as members of UE can forge the connection that climate science is union labor, it would be genuinely massive for climate efforts at large. Despite every person being intimately tied up in the outcomes of climate change, climate science has a reputation of being handed down from an ivory tower, and efforts to stem emissions suffer for it. We are currently on the track of warming that is 2.5°C or more above pre-industrial levels, even if we pursue aggressive mitigation, unless something unaccounted for happens. The recentering of climate science as made by workers, for workers, is unaccounted for. The fellow delegates and I formed a plan - they would initiate this process at the UE Western Regional Council, and I would do the same at the UE Eastern Regional Council this Spring. Additionally, we are currently working together on forming a meeting of graduate workers at the American Geophysical Union conference in December to talk about the role unions have to play in this federal attack on the sciences, following the UE principle of organizing the unorganized.

I am running for Delegate at Large on the Build / Activate / Mobilize slate because I know all fights are connected. The federal government has set itself on attacking climate mitigation efforts, climate justice efforts, higher education in general, international workers, trans people, Palestine and those who work to stop the genocide, our union, and more.