By Jorge Mercado Saturday, February 28th, 2026

By Paula Aven Gladych

The Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara continues to innovate when it comes to climate science, sustainability, resource management and policy, even in the face of federal funding cuts and a national anathema to environmental problems and concerns. 

Sarah Anderson, interim dean of the school, said that everything seems “uncertain” and that for many, it is hard to imagine a new way of doing things. 

“I try to think of it as exciting,” she said. 

“One of the things I learned out of this experience is that the shift that has happened has required people to be more precise about the ‘why’ they are doing something. That isn’t a bad thing.”

In the face of cuts, researchers at the school — both students and faculty — have started thinking about other ways to fund their research, whether from private foundations, corporations or partnerships with communities. 

“I do think there is a nice rethinking of how we make research relevant beyond the folks at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health who know that,” she said. 

“When I talk to colleagues concerned about federal funding, their move is to really think about other organizations that try to solve problems because they are out there.”

The Bren School’s mission is to solve environmental problems. 

“We do that by training the next environmental leaders,” she said. 

The school’s Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneurship program requires its students to collaborate over the course of a year to develop and refine a business model for a new, commercially viable product or service that makes a positive and measurable environmental impact.

As part of the program, the Bren School develops numerous partnerships within the community. Each master’s project has a client, such as a company, conservation agency, large or small NGO. 

That is an important innovation in education because it makes sure students are solving real-world problems and “brings into the program so many of the professional skills and practices needed of our workforce that we are building,” Anderson said. 

It gives students a chance to understand how different types of organizations work and teaches them how to engage in communication with a client, understand project management and how communication flows through a team, she added. 

“All pieces that can feel very intangible and hard to literally teach get embedded in this system of partnerships and hopefully we also are helping these organizations to build a workforce that can actually continue to solve the problems they face.”

Taylor Heisley-Cook and David Mun co-founded The Hurd Co. in Los Angeles based on the Eco-Entrepreneurship project they conducted as students at Bren. 

The goal was to find opportunities in the apparel space that would be compelling, solve real problems for brands and would allow them to make more sustainable materials.

“I felt like people could only make sustainable choices if they have sustainable options,” said Heisley-Cook, CEO of the company.

Through their research, they learned that “there were no available options that fit in the supply chain and were affordable enough to be used,” she said. 

They decided to find a replacement material that is more sustainable but costs the same as what textile companies already use. 

Their solution? 

A process that turns readily available agricultural waste into a pulp, similar to what is used to make man-made cellulosic feedstock pulp to produce fabrics like viscose/rayon, modal, or lyocell fabric, which are normally made from tree pulp. 

The company’s patented technology makes it possible to extract the same quality of cellulose from non-tree sources.

The Bren School’s Eco Entrepreneurship program helped the group learn how to analyze market size and opportunity and add in the impact and sustainability part of it, said Mun, COO of The Hurd Co. 

“That’s a combination you can’t find anywhere else, in my opinion. It gave us the foundation to meet technical partners and launch from there. 

It has been about seven years now and we are still at it,” he said.

The Bren School not only supported the students as they launched their company but also gave them a grant to help them get started.

Graduate student Elise Dauterive said that the Innovation program encourages students to devise their own projects, test their ideas and come up with business model frameworks that use the same language they would see in the real world. 

Coming up with an idea is only half the battle, she said. 

“Now we have to do it. We have faculty advisers to guide us. We figure everything out on our own. It is very challenging but very good for my learning experience because I think a big part of getting your master’s is giving yourself a task that is so vast and figuring out how to have output for it,” Dauterive said.

Dauterive added that the process is “very real world … fosters innovation, innovation within oneself to go beyond what you are told and challenging yourself in a different way to make things happen.”

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