Kira Smiley (B.S.H. '18, M.S. '19)
June 13, 2019
Kira is a coterm in the Earth Systems M.S. program focused on Food Security and the Environment, with a B.S.-Honors in Human Environmental Systems. She is from Bend, Oregon and a dual citizen in Finland. During her summers, she’s taken an international focus, from working on carbon tax and SDG research for Mitsubishi Research Institute in Japan, to traveling to Southern Patagonia with Rob Dunbar to learn about human-coupled systems and specifically fisheries and aquaculture in Southern Chile. At Stanford, she has worked for the past four years with the Solutions Science Lab under Dr. June Flora. For the first several years she worked on producing curriculum content for Girls Learning Environment and Energy (GLEE), teaching girl scouts about sustainable energy use. More recently, funded by NSF and partnered with OSU as part of the Sustainable Cities Initiative, she designed a curriculum called "Designing your energy Lifestyle," a design thinking and project-based curriculum that she then taught at Ohlone College in Newark, California during spring quarter 2018. During fall 2018, she trained another teacher, who then taught the second iteration of the program, and she is currently working on a proposal to present at an upcoming conference. Last year she worked on promoting knowledge of clean energy in the Stanford community as a co-organizer for the 2017 Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture with Students for a Sustainable Stanford. On the food systems end of her work and passion, Kira helped organize a 'National Workshop on Food Security, Equity, and Resilience' and has worked with Ertharin Cousin and Roz Naylor at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. She is currently working with Row House dining on shifting to plant-forward meals as part of a class project, working with a local grassroots NGO to improve fundraising efforts, and TA'ing World Food Economy.