To the Clark Community,

I write to share significant steps we have taken toward the launch of Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society. Opening in Fall 2025, the School is a transformative evolution of our work to address the most profound and urgent challenges of our time. Today, I am excited to announce the appointment of an exceptional leader who will guide the collective work of steering our bold plans forward.

Effective May 1, 2025, Lou Leonard will become the inaugural D.J.A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society. As dean, Lou will lead interdisciplinary efforts — anchored in the School — to solidify Clark’s recognition as a world-class contributor to confronting climate change and related ecological and social crises.

Under Dean Leonard’s leadership, Clark will merge its historic academic strengths and leading-edge research to advance a critical systems thinking approach to understanding our world. The School’s programs will integrate learning from across Clark, including the natural sciences, economics, political and social sciences, data sciences, the humanities, and business. We will pursue innovative, purposeful, and human-focused responses to global challenges on a local, regional, and planetary scale — a vital calling in an age of pressing, sometimes harrowing, environmental and social transformation.

We are fortunate to have Lou at the helm of this robust collaboration. He comes to Clark from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where he served as Dean of the Falk School of Sustainability and Environment and leader of the Eden Hall Campus, a sustainability-focused living-learning laboratory. For over a decade prior, Dean Leonard was Senior Vice President and leader of Climate & Energy for the World Wildlife Fund, the global conservation organization. In 2013, he founded One Earth Sangha, which focused on the intersection of mindfulness and the emotional dimensions of ecological and social crises. Lou earned his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and his JD in environmental law from Boston College Law School.

Throughout his career, Dean Leonard has served within government, the private sector, and nonprofit institutions to address climate, energy, and natural resource issues, including international treaty negotiations, corporate climate governance, energy project development, and Native American rights. Fittingly, his work has centered on the complex intersection of policy, science, business, and equitable community development.

I extend my deepest gratitude to the members of the Clark faculty and staff who have devoted so much time and energy to developing plans for the School and for helping recruit such a terrific inaugural dean. I also want to again recognize the generous $10 million foundational gift for the School by philanthropist and former trustee Vickie Riccardo and her daughters, Jocelyn Spencer and Alyssa Spencer ’17, in honor of their husband and father, the late Donald Spencer. The gift infused energy, promise, and potential into the establishment of the School at a critical time in our planning process. Now, with the naming of our inaugural dean, we are one step closer to making our vision a reality.

Sincerely,
David Fithian ’87