Elsa Godtfredsen (They/Them) is PhD student at Northwestern University, studying plant biology and conservation, specifically researching how climate change is altering the reproductive landscape of mountain plants. Elsa is a passionate climate change scientist, plant nerd and queer science advocate, believing that integrating plant science into conversations around climate change makes it more accessible, accurate and integral to our understanding of our changing world. Also, as a queer scientist, Elsa brings a unique perspective to both the science they do and the ways they communicate. Elsa is committed to both reaching more queer communities with accessible science as well as opening up the scientific communities they are a part of to be equitable and welcoming places for queer people.
For their outreach project, Elsa wrote a compelling op-ed titled “The Hidden Grief of Climate Experiments”. In this piece, Elsa explores their own personal experience with research in the face of climate change, their emotions and feelings about seeing these climatic shifts first hand and how scientific experimentation and manipulation may need to be shifted or changed as climate change steamrollers on.
Elsa also discusses feelings of climate grief from the perspective of a climate scientist and how young people might cope with these feelings in the face of climate change. Elsa’s op-ed is still in the works, stay tuned when the paper is finished to give it a read!
