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Author & Instructor Brandi Robinson
Assistant Teaching Professor
Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering
College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
The Pennsylvania State University
To reach me: Please use the course Email system (Inbox) in Canvas
What I'm working on now...
Hi there! My name is Brandi Robinson, and I am the instructor for this course. I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Energy and Sustainability Policy program. I've been teaching in ESP since 2010. In addition to teaching and advising ESP students, I teach one graduate course, EME 803 Applied Energy Policy and I've even been dabbling recently with teaching a residential section of GEOG 30N on campus. In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I'm on the Faculty Senate and the College's Academic Integrity Committee. I'm also the Green Team leader for our Institute for e-Education. I previously chaired my township's Climate Action Committee, where we inventoried our greenhouse gas emissions and worked on how to be carbon neutral by 2050 to comply with this resolution. Our inventory is done, now we need to pull that curve down! I currently chair the region's Implementation Technical Advisory Group for our Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. Most recently, I've become the co-director of the Local Climate Action Program which partners university students and municipal governments around Pennsylvania to help them inventory emissions and establish reduction goals. We just finished our first year under Penn State management of the program and we were able to work with 12 municipalities and county governments representing more than a million Pennsylvania residents!
A bit about my professional background...
Prior to coming to Penn State, I worked for Environment Credit Corp. (ECC) here in State College, PA. ECC is a greenhouse gas offset project development company focusing on agricultural methane and landfill methane projects. ECC works mostly with farms, landfills, and composting facilities to capture and destroy methane emissions and monetize these reductions in the form of carbon credits. In addition to managing many of our agricultural offset projects, it was also my responsibility to understand how policy developments at the state, regional, and national scale affect our projects and, ultimately, the environment. ECC works to educate lawmakers on the environmental and economic benefits of implementing offset projects.
I'm homegrown - born and raised just up the road from University Park in Williamsport, PA. The only thing you may know Williamsport for is the Little League World Series. I completed my undergraduate degree in 2003, with a dual BA in Environmental Studies and Geography from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. I then began the graduate program in Geography here at Penn State that fall and graduated in 2005. My primary research interests included local scale mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and invoking behavioral changes for energy and resource conservation. My thesis work focused on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of the University Park campus of PSU.
After graduating with my Masters, I worked briefly on a climate change grant at Penn State and then accepted a position with the University's Office of Physical Plant. There, I developed and maintained the greenhouse gas emission inventories for all of the Commonwealth campuses and worked with energy engineers to develop emission reduction strategies.
I'm really interested in the local scale response to this global problem of climate change. Some of you may have taken my GEOG 432 Energy Policy class, and so you know that enacting legislation is no small feat. But it gets easier at the smaller scales - so I'm trying to make a dent there where I can.
Out of the office Brandi...
So, what do I do when I'm not working? Like you, I have a very busy life outside of work and have to find time to juggle it all in a way that makes sense. Some days I feel like that works better than others. My husband, Anthony and I met when we came to Penn State to begin the Master's in Geography. Map love! We have a second grader who is an insatiable book worm and meticulous with her (entirely too large) Playmobil collection. In 2017, my family had the chance to live in Salzburg, Austria for half of the year while Anthony was on a Fulbright. That means I now have a kid who is fluent in German and loves schnitzel. My picture here is from our most recent trip back to Salzburg in the summer of 2019. This is the Gosausee which is a lake probably about an hour's drive from Salzburg. The scenery in the Salzkammergut region is just breathtaking.
In my free time, I like to bake, play Playmobil with my kiddo, and scour local thrift shops for old Pyrex and Glasbake dishes. I also really enjoy consignment shopping for clothes and books, too. Recycle! Save money! Everyone wins.