I’m Lyndsay.

I’m from a small town in southeastern Wisconsin and the daughter of Scottish immigrants who moved to the US a few years before I was born.

I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for my bachelors degree, where I pursued my passion for sustainability through the Biological Systems Engineering program.  In my senior year, I worked with a team to design a wetland restoration at a site near my hometown as part of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Wetlands Reserve Program.

When I graduated I took an opportunity to work as an engineer for an oil company in Dallas.  I calculated company-wide greenhouse gas emissions for EPA reporting, performed site inspections, and helped lead hazard and operability studies. One of the projects I’m most proud of is developing a model to assess the financial and environmental benefits of implementing water recycling program in field locations (a practice could prevent the pollution of up to 3 million gallons of water for each well drilled without a measurable cost impact). 


I left engineering to pursue a graduate degree, focusing on public health which I saw as an area largely overlooked in the environmental and safety fields.  I interned with the California EPA Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and carried out a large-scale study examining how climate impacts mental health-related hospitalizations.  I was delighted to contribute to the growing field of research on the tangible and personal health impacts of climate change.

I was inspired after attending a presentation by the Center for Advanced Hindsight explaining how different principals of behavioral science can be harnessed to influence people’s behavior with regard to their transportation choices, waste practices, and energy and water use. Six months after attending that presentation, I accepted a position with the Center for Advanced Hindsight, where for three years, I helped run large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to determine what strategies are most effective in motivating people to make sustainable choices. 

Today, I use the skills built through that applied research to bring innovation and experimentation to the City of Durham, North Carolina, where I serve as manager of the Innovation Team. In my free time I love to write, read, hike, run, practice yoga, cautiously mountain bike, snuggle with my dogs, and explore all of the wonderful breweries in North Carolina.