Fan Dai Ph.D. ’15
From the forests of southeastern China to snowy Central New York and urban Berkeley, California, Fan Dai Ph.D. ’15 built the educational and professional experience that positioned her to help launch a new environmental institute to address the challenges of climate change.
Dai is the founding director of the California-China Climate Institute, where she works to build a platform for collaborative climate action. The institute’s tools are joint training, research and dialogue.
“Our mission is to bring together the driving forces in California (as well as other U.S. states) and China … to address climate change, scale up the climate solutions and build more constructive bilateral relations,” Dai said in an email conversation.
Dai manages the U.C. Berkeley-based institute on a daily basis. She said she works to institutionalize partnerships and weave the institute’s “big ideas” into individual programs.
Dai was raised in suburban Fujian Province, which is about 80 percent forested. “I was very used to green and the natural environment, which inspired my pursuit of a career in the environmental field, to preserve and protect nature,” she said.
Her journey to ESF began at a conference organized by Beijing Forestry University, where she met Dr. David Sonnenfeld of the Department of Environmental Studies. Dai credits Sonnenfeld for giving her the idea to travel abroad to study environmental policy. She earned her doctorate in 2015 with Dr. David Newman as her major professor.
Shortly before arriving in Syracuse, Dai had worked at the Chinese State Forestry Administration as a research Intern, where she focused on studying forest carbon sequestration and providing policy advice to the Chinese Climate Negotiation Team on the topic of forestry and climate change. She said studying environmental economics and policy at ESF, combined with her early-career exposure to climate change negotiations, shaped her research interest on the topic within the context of changing U.S.-China relations.
Before completing her Ph.D. she earned a master’s degree in law from U.C. Berkeley and held several positions in California state government during the tenure of then-Governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., who now serves as institute chair. Dai was a specialist on international business and investment in the Office of Business and Economic Development and a climate change adviser with the state Environmental Protection Agency. She continued to work as a special adviser with a focus on China and international policy when Gavin Newsom took over as California governor in January 2019.
The institute grew out of a meeting between Brown and Chinese President Xi Jinping during Brown’s second official trip to China in 2017. Dai had helped plan the trip for Brown; the leaders met to strengthen the tie between California and China on energy, environment and climate change.
“I was impressed by the initiative she took to prepare herself for a very high-profile position,” Newman said. “She pulled together a really solid dissertation committee, and she was extremely focused on what she wanted to do.”
Dai said she looks forward to “sharing, connecting and collaborating with ESF alumni” regarding her work with the institute.