The Campus as Lab (CAL) Program, offered through the Office of Sustainability, allows dedicated and passionate students like Dan Le, SPIA ’27, to pursue the kind of groundbreaking research that ultimately leads to social change - both within and outside of Princeton’s campus. 

Le’s research, pursued with fellow research associate Chris Bao CAS ’27, examined the environmental justice infrastructure, or lack thereof, within the university’s curricular offerings. She credits the CAL program with facilitating her exploration of what a "structured curriculum in the realm of environmental justice could look like at Princeton,” and hopes that their findings will open the door to more classes and engagement opportunities going forward. 

Le, an Economics major and English minor, worked with Assistant Director Academic Engagement and Campus as Lab initiatives and Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (CPREE) Professional Specialist Cara Clase, her project advisor, to shape the scope of her and Bao’s work. “We worked in four distinct phases,” she said. “The first phase was creating an annotated bibliography to ground our discussion, and then the second phase was conducting a comparative analysis.” Le and Bao did an exhaustive study of environmental justice offerings - such as working groups and research labs - at peer Ivy League institutions to identify any gaps in Princeton’s approach to the topic.

“We found that there are no official links on campus to bridge the faculty and students who are interested or invested in environmental justice,” she shared. “In other words, there is no central node of engagement.”

Le interfaced with students directly via surveys to build awareness and gather data on their level of familiarity with environmental topics. “The potential is there for a lot of work to be done here in the field, but we realized that a lot of people didn’t know what environmental justice means in practical terms.”

She also highlighted the important work that faculty have been doing in this regard. “The only dedicated Environmental Justice class we’ve had on campus has been taught by a visiting professor,” she said. “But many professors, especially within Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), attempt to weave environmental justice topics into their syllabus. There is a lot of thinking being done about new academic curriculum that could be added to CPREE.”

Le and Bao have completed the 3^rd phase of their project, an in-depth examination of Princeton’s own history with Environmental Justice, and are now considering how to launch the final phase, which will involve presenting recommendations to campus administrators about how to build a framework – both academic and cocurricular – for engaging with the field at Princeton. “Our goal is to try to integrate the committed people and meaningful work that is already being done on campus,” Le shared. 

For more info about the CAL program, visit the website  to dive into past and present research projects – and follow us throughout the summer for more highlights of the student researchers and staff advisors making this work possible!