
Kathleen Song is a Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative (SINSI) Graduate Fellow and a first-year Master in Public Affairs candidate at SPIA. She previously earned a Bachelor’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2023. During undergrad, Kathleen was elected to Sigma Xi Honor Society and Tau Beta Pi Honor Society and received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence, the Tau Beta Pi National Scholarship, the New Jersey Society of Women Environmental Professionals Scholarship, and the New Jersey Water Environment Association Daniel E. Bigler Award.
Kathleen is interested in climate and energy policy, especially in topics of decarbonization, energy transition, and economic incentives for climate action. In 2022, Kathleen interned at the US Dept. of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division assisting US attorneys with cases related to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. She has also worked as a research assistant for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where she reviewed and fact-checked the manuscript of the “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” before it was published in 2019. Kathleen has also volunteered with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a citizen group advocating for bipartisan carbon pricing legislation, and conducted research with Princeton University’s Urban Nexus Lab, the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and the University of California, Los Angeles’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, through which she co-authored a paper on modeling air pollution in the Western US. She is originally from Orange County, California