Abigail Reyes

Abby Reyes is the director of the Sustainability Initiative at the University of California, Irvine.  Part of the Office of Academic Initiatives, the Sustainability Initiative is making engaged sustainability scholarship and practice integral to UC Irvine’s excellence as a research, teaching, and service university. Ms. Reyes also is a co-Principal Investigator on the FloodRISE Project, leading the Research Integration and Impact Team.  In addition, she provides planning and facilitation services for the Salton Sea Initiative, Water UCI, and Nexus 2014.

Prior to joining the Sustainability Initiative, Ms. Reyes was a sustainability researcher at the UC Irvine Environment Institute.  She brings to UC Irvine experience convening interdisciplinary research teams of scientists, engineers, and lawyers to address community-identified sustainable development challenges.

Her experience includes facilitating collaboration between academic and public sector researchers and indigenous communities in Colombia and the Philippines, and coordinating legal research in support of landmark international human rights and environmental cases in the domestic federal courts. She completed her bachelor’s degree in human biology at Stanford University in 1995 and her JD at UC Berkeley Law in 2004.  After clerking for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Ms. Reyes served as a staff attorney at the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.  She serves on the board of directors of EarthRights International and is an ambassador for the Pollination Project.