Rachael Petersen
PHD Student at Harvard University
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolRachael Petersen is a strategic advisor, writer, and convener who brings 12 years of experience advancing climate, conservation, and interdisciplinary scholarship across nonprofit, philanthropic, and academic sectors. Currently a PhD student at Harvard, she founded and led the university’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi initiative, translating provocative ideas about animal and plant intelligence into public programs, funded research, and curricular leadership. As founder of Earthrise Services and a former Deputy Director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute, she blends high-level fundraising and program strategy with hands-on research and partnership building for large-scale forest and indigenous-rights outcomes. Her work spans advising major philanthropies and institutions (including National Geographic and the Bezos Earth Fund) and designing pragmatic strategies to move bold environmental ideas into measurable impact. Holding an MDiv with research in panpsychism and the more-than-human world, she pairs scholarly curiosity with practical facilitation skills as a trained Buddhist Ecochaplain. A less obvious strength is her knack for securing significant philanthropic support (including a six-figure grant for interdisciplinary plant studies) while keeping conversations generative across scientists, humanists, and funders.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, 4.0 / Valedictorian, High School Diploma, 4.0 / Valedictorian at Temple High SchoolBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Anthropology, Environmental Policy; Poverty, Justice, and Human Capability Minor, 4.09 GPA, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Anthropology, Environmental Policy; Poverty, Justice, and Human Capability Minor, 4.09 GPA at Rice UniversityMaster of Divinity - MDiv, Master of Divinity - MDiv at Harvard Divinity School
Spanish, German, Portuguese, penan, Italian
Github Skills (20)
satellite-imagery10
redux10
monitoring9
nextjs9
react9
linear-regression7
naive-bayes7
logistic-regression7
clustering6
jupyter-notebook5
data-cleaning5
python5
machine-learning4
ensemble-learning4
natural-language-processing4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
rachnp89/DAT5-Project
Mar 2015 - Oct 2015
Contributions:24 pushes in 6 months
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