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PhD in Sustainable Development Student Profiles

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Nicole Ngo

Nicole Ngo is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Sustainable Development program. Her research interests include air pollution and environmental and development economics. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Earth and Environmental Science in 2006. At UC Irvine, her senior thesis focused on studying the ‘urban metabolism’ of Los Angles County. She studied this urban area as an ecosystem and observed the major resource inputs and outputs in relation to sustainability.

For the past three summers she has participated in the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) internship during which she spent the summer of 2006 examining the relationship between the growth of U.S. aquaculture and employment at the Marine Policy Center in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and during the summer of 2007 she researched the potential of purchasing carbon offsets as a mitigation tool for CO2 emissions at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.