Melissa Brown

Melissa Brown is Deputy Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, where she helps to guide the Center’s overall strategy and oversees its academic programs, grant programs, fellowship and visiting scholar programs, and communications.

 

Brown joined the MacMillan Center from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as the inaugural Senior Director of the Environmental Innovations Initiative. Formed in 2020, the mission of the initiative is to “catalyze solutions to significant real-world environmental challenges” by fostering collaboration across disciplines, leading inclusive and dynamic programming on- and off-campus and forming strategic partnerships. Before joining Penn in 2021, she was at Yale University for nearly 20 years—first with the School of the Environment, then with the Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and finally with the Office of Sustainability.

 

Prior to her career in academia, Brown worked for the United Nations Development Programme, managing projects focused on addressing climate change in the Global South. She is a member of the external advisory board of the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability and a member of the Intellectual Community of the Global Climate Innovation Centre. She is also a senior fellow with the International Sustainable Campus Network, where she oversees the Global University Climate Forum, represents the Network in global negotiations, and is helping to create a Latin American Chapter. She earned her PhD and MS degrees from Antioch University and her BFA from New York University.