Alaina Kinol
PhD in Public Policy
Alaina is a PhD candidate in Public Policy in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, with a concentration in Sustainability and Resilience. She earned her BA in agricultural and environmental International Development Studies at McGill University, and a MSc with Distinction in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics. In these programs Alaina learned and applied a variety of methods and theoretical frameworks, primarily in the disciplines of geography, economics, human rights, environmental science, and law.
Since completing her undergraduate degree, Alaina has worked on climate and energy policy across the spectrum from research to advocacy to implementation, most recently as the Project Manager for the Clean Energy Valuation group at E4TheFuture in Massachusetts. She has applied this work in climate adaptation and mitigation efforts across sectors, including as a summer 2021 Climate Fellow with the office of now-Mayor Michelle Wu. Alaina’s research interests focus on transformational climate justice policy design, implementation, and analysis, as well as the implications of climate policy obstruction efforts by the Carbon Complex. She is currently funded by a grant from the Climate Social Science Network to study the Carbon Complex as well as an NIH T32 Traineeship with Northeastern’s Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute and the Silent Spring Institute.