Announcing our New 2025 Fellows and the Judy Bergsma Scholarship!
We’re proud to announce two new Launchpad Fellows for the 2025 calendar year, and two recipients of our new Judy Bergsma Scholarship!
For over a decade, the Safina Center’s Kalpana Chawla Launchpad Fellowship program has helped propel the careers of young, talented individuals with the power to reach people’s hearts and change their values. The fellowship is named after Kalpana Chawla, who unfortunately perished aboard the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia. She had taken Carl Safina’s book Song for the Blue Ocean into space with her aboard the shuttle. In her honor and memory, her family gifted to the Safina Center an endowment to be used to launch talent under 30 years old.
This generous gift has supported our program since its inception, and this year, it will support two new members of the Safina Center family: Mikaela Loach and Isaias Hernandez.
Mikaela Loach:
Mikaela Loach is a Jamaican-British acclaimed author, climate justice organizer, and speaker, recognized as one of the most influential women in the UK climate movement by Forbes, Global Citizen, and BBC Woman’s Hour. Prospect magazine has described her as one of the “World's Top Thinkers” in 2024. Her impactful climate activism has garnered an online community of over 280,000 combined followers, reaching over 1 million people with her videos on climate and social justice every month.
Mikaela is the best-selling author of It's Not That Radical: Climate Action To Transform Our World, a compelling call for climate justice published in April 2023 by Dorling Kindersley, a division of Penguin Random House. Her debut book won the Non-fiction Author of the Year award in Bookshop.org’s Indie Champion Awards. Her next book, Climate Is Just The Start, will be published by Random House Children's in March 2025 and is a Junior Library Guild Selection. Additionally, she co-hosted The YIKES Podcast and is a former medical student.
Isaias Hernandez:
Isaias Hernandez is an environmentalist, educator, and creative devoted to improving environmental literacy through content creation, storytelling, and public engagements. He’s more commonly known by his moniker, Queer Brown Vegan: the independent media platform he started to bring intersectional environmental education to all.
His journey to deconstruct complex issues, while centering diversity and authenticity, has resonated with a worldwide audience. He also collaborates with other leaders from the private and public sectors to uplift and produce stories of change for his independent web series, Sustainable Jobs and Teaching Climate Together.
Isaias has been featured in several noteworthy publications, including Vogue, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Business Insider. His social media advocacy earned him recognition as a top climate creator by Harvard C-CHANGE. As a public speaker, he’s presented for New York Times, Nike, UC Berkeley, Billie Eilish’s Overheated Summit, Harvard University, and more. He recently co-founded the Symbiocene events company that operates worldwide.
Along with our two new fellows, we’re proud to announce the Judy Bergsma Scholarship, a new way for us to fund the early careers of talented creators! Judy Bergsma was a longtime supporter of the Safina Center, personal friend of Carl, and champion of Indigenous women After her recent passing, we’ve decided to honor her incredible legacy with a new scholarship.
This year, we’ve selected two talented individuals to receive the scholarship: Abigail Costigan and Florence Aghomo
Abigail Costigan is a marine biologist, former employee of the Safina Center, and doctoral student in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, where she earned her master’s degree in marine conservation and policy. Her research is structured around reducing North Atlantic right whale entanglement in fishing gear. Prior to that, she researched horseshoe crab spawning habitat use in the Peconic Estuary.
Florence Aghomo is a doctoral student at the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences (IDPAS) at Stony Brook University. She is part of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE), which is supervised by Dr. Patricia Wright. Her PhD dissertation focuses on assessing the vulnerability of Propithecus edwardsi and identifying appropriate conservation strategies for the Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar. She holds a master’s degree of Science in Inland Water Quality Assessment from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. Last year, the Society for Conservation Biology Africa Region awarded her the Young Women in Conservation Biology (YWCB) Award 2024.
