Reflections from Brown’s Bell Alaska Program

The Arctic as Classroom

In July 2025, I spent two weeks in Alaska with Brown University’s Bell Alaska Program. The experience was not a traditional summer course. There were no final exams — only field journals, Indigenous elder dialogues, and the quiet realization that leadership looks different when you are standing on permafrost.

We studied Arctic ecosystem dynamics, glacial retreat rates, and the feedback loops accelerating climate change at high latitudes. But the most powerful lessons came from the Indigenous communities we visited. Their knowledge systems are not “complementary” to Western science — they are parallel epistemologies with thousands of years of empirical refinement. Learning to hold both frameworks simultaneously, without collapsing one into the other, was the intellectual challenge of the program.

From Models to Action Plans

For my capstone Action Plan, I applied my CFD pollution dispersion models to a local problem: volcanic ash distribution patterns from Mount Redoubt. The physics are analogous — particulate transport in stratified atmospheric conditions — but the stakes are immediate for Alaska’s aviation and respiratory health infrastructure. Brown professors pushed me to move beyond analysis to implementation: who would use this? What would it cost? What partnerships would be required?

I returned from Alaska with a revised definition of leadership. It is not about being the smartest person in the room. It is about creating conditions where diverse forms of expertise — computational, Indigenous, institutional — can collaborate without hierarchy. That is the kind of leader I am working to become.