As part of Yale’s celebration of Earth Month, the Office of Sustainability recognized community members on April 8 for outstanding contributions to sustainability on campus and beyond.
The 2026 Yale Sustainability Awards were presented during the annual State of Sustainability gathering, which took place in Sterling Memorial Lecture Hall.
Honorees included faculty, staff, students, and teams who expanded global climate-and-conservation training; built a campus clothing-reuse pipeline; modernized IT to enable smarter building operations; grew Yale’s tree canopy; and cut medical waste by salvaging supplies for surgical training.
“While some of us have sustainability as part of our professional roles, others drive sustainability through their personal behaviors, by influencing peers and colleagues. We want to celebrate those contributions,” said Amber Garrard, Director of the Office of Sustainability. “This year we paid special attention to the impact nominees’ efforts had; the level of innovation and replicability represented by their work; the level of collaboration; and the commitment to equity and justice.”
Faculty Award — Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI)
The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) trains and support people from many sectors and backgrounds to restore and conserve tropical forests in ways that protect biodiversity and support local livelihoods. Its work often centers on human-dominated landscapes—where agriculture, ranching, or other uses have reduced forests to remnant patches—helping practitioners restore native tree cover and ecosystem services such as clean water and erosion control. With field-based trainings in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Indonesia, and the Philippines, ELTI helps turn research into practical climate, conservation, and restoration work. Through education, mentorship, and project funding, the program supports measurable results for communities and ecosystems, grounded in equity and local partnerships.
Pictured: Eva Garen, program director of ELTI, Yale School of the Environment
Group Award — Dwight Hall Clothing Bin
The Dwight Hall Service Series is building a sustainable, community-centered clothing reuse program that reduces campus waste while strengthening long-term partnerships with local organizations. The effort grew from an earlier Dwight Hall member group initiative (YHHAP) that launched a clothing donation bin near Dwight Chapel and has evolved over several years to better support community needs while ensuring responsible reuse. This year, Dwight Hall made clothing-bin sorting a recurring volunteer opportunity open to all students, welcoming groups including a local high school Green Team and alumni during a day of service. A key to the program’s momentum has been student leadership: volunteer coordinator Gloria McComas and former coordinator Allie Lopez help deliver sorted clothing based on community partners’ needs, while lead volunteer coordinator Alessandra Pappalardi has mobilized hundreds of students to participate.
Pictured: Alessandra Pappalardi and Gloria McComas
Group Award — Next Generation Network
The Next Generation Network (NGN) program is modernizing Yale’s digital infrastructure to create a more resilient and secure system while enabling smarter, data-driven building operations. Over seven years, NGN replaced aging legacy hardware with energy-efficient systems, strengthened redundancy and cybersecurity, and consolidated and decommissioned outdated equipment to reduce the university’s IT energy footprint and electronic sprawl.
The project laid critical groundwork for integrating smart-building technologies that can optimize energy use and improve campus sustainability monitoring. Extensive cross-campus collaboration helped ensure the upgrades reached academic, residential, administrative, and medical spaces—supporting more consistent, equitable access to reliable digital infrastructure across the Yale community.
Pictured above (L–R): Jeremy Rosenberg (assistant vice president, IT, and CISO), Timothy Sheets (IT director, Network Engineering & Operations), and Shawn Clark (IT director, Strategic Projects)
Group Award — Milestone Campus Tree Planting Program
The Milestone Campus Tree Planting program has honored hundreds of Yale employee work anniversaries while expanding the campus tree canopy. Conceived by Brenda Naegel, director of Staff Recognition and Engagement, the program gives Yale employees who are celebrating milestone work anniversaries the option to have a tree planted on campus in lieu of selecting a personal gift.
Working with Urban Resources Initiative staff Anna Pickett and Chris Ozyck and Yale School of the Environment communications staff member Mike Slattery, Naegel helped build a program that has planted 110 trees since the first event in 2014, honoring 472 employees. Pickett tracks orders and milestones, Ozyck works with Facilities to select species and locations and leads planting, and Slattery maintains an online map of planting sites and honorees. The team comes together with honorees and volunteers at two annual plantings—typically during Celebrate Sustainability Week in the fall and the Yale Day of Service in the spring—events that have become visible, community-wide celebrations. The program’s success has also helped spur other sustainable recognition options and additional campus tree plantings to mark milestones such as retirements.
Pictured above (L–R): Mike Slattery, Anna Pickett, Brenda Naegel, Chris Ozyck
Undergraduate Student Award — Karinne Tennenbaum
Yale College student Karinne Tennenbaum was recognized for conservation leadership that combines research with creative public engagement. Through the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, she built a student volunteer task force to monitor areas around campus buildings and inform biodiversity stewardship, especially during migration. She also founded “Taking Flight,” including the Cranes of Yale project, which paired endangered crane conservation with Japanese origami traditions and helped earn her recognition as a finalist for The World Around’s 2025 Young Climate Prize.
Graduate Student Award — Winston Trope
Yale School of Medicine MD candidate Winston Trope was honored for embedding sustainability into surgical education by building a formal salvage-and-reuse system that repurposes thousands of medical supplies that would otherwise be discarded. As program lead of the Yale Surgical Education Workshops (2025–2026), he partnered with perioperative staff to divert approximately 4,000 sutures, 780 gloves, and more than 200 instruments into structured skills training, reducing procurement needs while expanding hands-on practice.
He also developed inventory, storage, and continuity systems to make the effort scalable and durable, and—working with clerkship leaders, residents, and the School of Nursing—has helped make waste reduction and cost stewardship part of everyday medical training
Staff Award — Dan Benedetti
Dan Benedetti, an equipment mechanic with Yale’s Office of Facilities, was recognized for turning discarded campus materials into one-of-a-kind plant installations that make sustainability visible through creative reuse. Using “found” objects that would otherwise enter the waste stream, he creates living arrangements—many displayed in spaces like the Sterling Chemistry Building—that extend the life of campus materials while brightening shared environments.
His work supports waste reduction in a practical, low-cost way and improves everyday spaces for students, staff, faculty, and visitors by bringing nature indoors. By placing these repurposed plant installations in shared, public-facing spaces, he creates points of interaction that prompt questions about the materials used, the plants themselves, and the idea of reuse, waste reduction, and creative problem-solving.
Special Recognition - Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative
In addition to the Sustainability Awards„ leaders of the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative were formally presented the 2025 Excellence Award by the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN). Yale was honored in the Partnerships for Progress category, which honors collaborations that engage external partners—from nonprofits to government to private industry—to disseminate knowledge, research, and best practices in ways that will benefit the communities they serve. The award was announced in November.
Established in 2021, the project aims to accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly design in the built environment. It is a collaboration among the Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Office of Sustainability, the Yale Office of Facilities, and the American Bird Conservancy, with funding provided by Yale Planetary Solutions.
Pictured L-R: Kristof Zyskowski, Ornithology Collections Manager at the Yale Peabody Museum, and Cathy Jackson, Director of Planning Administration in the Yale Office of Facilities