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Rob and Melani Walton
Sustainability Fellowship Program

Turning knowledge into collaborative action

To solve the world’s toughest challenges, we require its brightest minds. Rob and Melani Walton Fellows come from across the globe to collaborate with the Arizona State University community on novel research, projects and solutions that identify scalable global impacts and benefits.

Rob and Melani Walton Fellows represent the highest level of practitioners and scholars from the following sectors:

  • business
  • government
  • non-governmental organizations
  • universities
  • public or nonprofit research institutions

Each fellow brings their unique expertise and perspective to sustainability to blend with ASU students, faculty, researchers and staff to explore, discuss and develop new approaches to the economic, social and environmental challenges that our planet confronts each day.

Post-doctoral Fellow Jenny Hodbod

Emeritus Post-doctoral Research Fellows


  • Designer of sustainability programs and systems

  • Connector of sustainability and community happiness

  • Investigator of land use’s impact on food systems

  • Developer of social equity through engineering

  • Examiner of the mind and its influence in implementing climate solutions

  • Engineer of sustainable systems within the built environment

Emeritus Senior Fellows

Projects

The following are a sample of projects generated by Rob and Melani Walton Fellows:

  • Sustainability Decision Lab A graduate seminar that integrates concepts from three different fields of scholarship – sustainability, complex systems and cognition – to explore the way individuals and groups think, feel, make decisions and behave with regard to sustainability across all scales
  • SoilCarbon Nation A multi-institution collaboration researching if improved livestock grazing and restoration can contribute significantly to sequestering carbon in rangeland soils
  • Mayor’s Subcommittee on Vacant Lands A collaboration with Local First Arizona and the city of Phoenix to develop a strategy to make city-owned vacant land available for NGOs active in urban agriculture
  • Biofuel Expansion in Ethiopia Establishment of a longitudinal dataset of impacts on food security due to the expansion of sugarcane-ethanol systems

The Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Fellowship program is supported through funding from the .