Laura Frye-Levine
Bio
Laura Frye-Levine is an environmental sociologist who studies sustainability knowledge work. She engages in both traditional academic research and in the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration. This work is informed by her formal training in both social science and natural science, as well as her time spent as a practitioner of sustainable development with local people who are the experts of their own needs and interests.
Laura earned dual PhDs in Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and spent a year as a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her dissertation examined collaborative efforts between economists and ecologists to craft more comprehensive approaches to environmental conservation. As an inaugural Impact Fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium (2021-2024), she studied the logics of sustainability used by institutional practitioners and the challenges faced by interdisciplinary teams seeking to collaboratively develop climate solutions.
Laura has a professional background in sustainable development and community-engaged design. She received a Master’s of Environmental Science from the Yale School of the Environment, where she studied community-based conservation efforts in a remote village near Cusuco National Park in Honduras. She returned to this community to document the complexities of conservation and development efforts in the film Export (2009), which brought the voices of smallholder coffee producers to an international audience. Prior to becoming a sociologist, she served as Director of Research of the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Kentucky in her hometown of Lexington. She has collaborated and advised on projects funded by the European Commission, the UN Population Program, the US National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wisconsin Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, the Yale Tropical Resources Institute, the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, and the Yale Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability.
Laura has mentored students working on sustainability-related topics from within a wide range of fields, including: engineering, computer science, urban studies, sociology, public health, public policy, sustainable development, and curriculum design. She is currently mentoring undergraduate and PhD research at MIT, the University of Washington, and Central Asian University.
