Director of University of California Alianza MX and professor at the UC Riverside’s School of Public Policy, Dr. Studer,has a unique career in government, academia, and civil society. She was Director for Strategic Partnerships in Latin America, leading the Climate Solutions Strategy, and Executive Director for Mexico and Northern Central America at The Nature Conservancy. She founded the Global Institute for Sustainability and was the Leader of Energy and Corporate Sustainability at EGADE Business School at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

In the Mexican government, Dr. Studer held high-level positions at the Mexican Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AMEXCID) and Mexico’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). She was also Director for Research at the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation.

Senior Fellow at the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Resilience Center of The Atlantic Council, Dr. Studer is President of the Board of the Mexican Climate Initiative and a member of the Board of Directors of the World Environment Center (WEC), the Dow Chemical Company’s Sustainability Experts’ Advisory Board (SEAC) and panel for the Environment for Peace Report of the Stockholm Institute for Peace and International Relations. Previously, she served as Chair of the Climate Committee in Mexico’s Advisory Council on Water, a member of the National Climate Change Council, chaired by Nobel Prize Mario Molina, of the Scientific Committee for The Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) of Science Po (Paris) and of the Advisory Board of the Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN).

A Fulbright and Ford Scholar, Dr. Studer was recognized with Johns Hopkins University’s Distinguished Alumna Award in 2020 and twice by Forbes Magazine as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in Mexico.” She earned her Ph.D. and an M.A. at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a BA degree in international relations from El Colegio de México. She is a columnist for El Heraldo de Mexico and has published extensively on climate change, the environment, and trade and regional integration. Her books include Designing Integration: Regional Governance on Climate Change in North America (coedited with Neil Craick and Debora Van Njnatten, Toronto University Press, 2013) and Ford and the Global Strategies of Multinationals (London: Routledge, 2001).

He is interested understanding awareness of climate change and strategies to address it as well as the public’s willingness to act. He also examines the conditions associated with the decision of a municipality to implement a local climate program. In addition, Almeida works on the feasibility of green economic and technological initiatives in terms of community and labor benefits. He teaches courses on Environmental Sociology, Climate Justice, Climate Change and Society, and Social Movements. Almeida is a founding member of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. He is an affiliate of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) and participates in the San Joaquin Valley Climate Justice Collaborative. He sits on the Climate Change steering committee of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and the University of California Decarbonization Committee. He acts as a Faculty Mentor for the UC-Mexico Climate Research Program and the UC Alianza MX Climate Ambassadors Initiative. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Climate Action.