2026 AGU ELECTIONS
Stella Heflin
AGU Council Student and Early Career Positions
Student Representative
Bio
Research Assistant, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
AGU embraces the global community and welcomes leaders representing various identities, voices and perspectives. List any identities, voices and perspectives you would bring, including but not limited to nationality, regional representations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and anything else you feel comfortable sharing.
As a woman in Earth science, I have often been the only female in the room, and understand what it is like to lack a sense of belonging in these spaces. This identity drives my interest in K-12 outreach as well as in conference organizing, with the goal of bringing more women and minorities into Earth science and making sure there are spaces where they feel not only welcome but actively included at all levels.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona when our department head was killed in an on-campus shooting. I bring this experience with gun violence into my leadership work by understanding both the complexity that surrounds institutional governance with regards to safety, and the critical importance of a safe working environment to doing good science.
Volunteer experience that you feel relates to this position:
I have been a three-year member of the Graduate Student Steering Committee of the Program on Climate Change, helping to organize interdisciplinary community building events. I have also served as a two-year member of the Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) Organizing Committee, helping to run the logistics, finances, website, and attendee communications. I have also helped run numerous public outreach events over the past three years of graduate school focused on K-12 climate science education.
Q&A
The AGU Council is a diverse forum of perspectives that meets throughout the year to provide input to the AGU Board, staff, and other parts of the organization. Three communities within the Council—committee chairs, section leaders, and students and early career scientists—serve different roles in AGU and bring unique viewpoints to ongoing discussions.
The Council has up to 12 positions for student and early career members. The student and early career voices on the Council are critical to the future of Earth and space sciences. How have you taken intentional action to inspire others to advance a cause, mission, or goal? In my experience, the best way to meet collective goals is to work with others to organize, educate, and build powerful, inclusive coalitions. I am especially passionate about connecting with and inspiring others around collectively-built solutions that address the societal and scientific challenge of climate change. During my undergraduate career, I was a co-director of a student government sustainability program, and also worked to get city-level climate policy enacted. In these roles, I helped others organize around advancing sustainability on campus through collaborative grant writing, leading big picture conversations, and coordinating volunteer events. I also partnered with stakeholder networks, youth organizers, and city policy staff to draft legislative text, and through conversations with local leaders on adapting to future warming, gathered support for the passage of several key climate policies. Building on this experience, during graduate school and as the Earth science community was responding to federal budget proposals, I worked on the Weather and Climate Livestream team. We ran a 100 hour livestream and generated over 9,000 calls to Congress in support of federal science funding. In my role, I was responsible for outreach to hundreds of academic departments around the country, organizing speakers and volunteers, and helping run live programming over five days that provided free weather and climate education to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. These examples demonstrate my continuous motivation to inspire others, especially other young people and early career scientists, and I look forward to continuing to serve my scientific community.