Featured Alumni

Stephanie

Stephanie Lavallato '13

When asked about life after graduation, Stephanie Lavallato '13 said, "Since my time at Ithaca, I’ve always been interested in the intersection of business and environmental and social change. I first started my career in San Francisco as a marketing data analyst at CREDO Mobile, a cell phone company that uses a portion of its revenue to donate to progressive nonprofits and fund its own activism arm, CREDO Action (it was my analysis skills from my time as a research assistant for the IC ENVS department that landed me the job!). I eventually moved into a partnerships role, where I managed relationships with the nonprofits we funded, such as 350.org, Color Of Change, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

After 5 years, I left CREDO to join a nonprofit called CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) based in NYC, an organization that works with corporations and investors to measure and manage their environmental impacts, where I now leverage my skills in both data and partnerships. As CDP’s Global Data Manager for the Investor Initiatives team, I oversee our commercial data licensing partnerships in the financial sector. It is our team’s mission to shift capital to a low-carbon economy. We facilitate this by helping investors, banks, and companies alike use CDP's corporate environmental data to assess their business or investment risks from climate change and recognize the financial opportunities in the low-carbon transition.

I have become increasingly interested in the role of capital markets in reversing climate change. To further explore this interest, I recently started a part-time MBA in Sustainability at Bard College with the goal of increasing my business and financial sector knowledge through the lens of sustainability."

Ben Knowles

Ben Knowles '14

When asked about life after graduation, Ben Knowles '14 said, “Six months after graduating from IC in 2014, I moved to Wilmington, NC to work at a 35 million-gallon-per-day water treatment plant as a Process Operator with the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority.  I moved up the ranks to Control Operator where my job was to manipulate the plant from the intake 20 miles up river to the distribution tanks located throughout the city.  

In 2017, I switched jobs and started as a control room operator for Cypress Creek Renewables (CCR) in Durham, NC. CCR is a solar company that builds, owns, and operates utility-scale solar farms all around the country. As a huge proponent of renewable energy, this was pretty much a dream job. When I started, we were operating 2MW to 10MW solar farms from a small space in the back of a café. One year later we moved into a brand new multi-million dollar control center, operated over 2GW of capacity, and became one of the few NERC-compliant third-party operations and management providers in the country.

In 2018, I was recruited to a similar position with another company. In January of 2019, I moved back to my home city of Philadelphia to become the Operations Center Manager at Miller Bros. Solar. Here, I’m using a lot of the procedures and practices that I learned at my old role to help build the operations team and become a national leader in third-party O&M. To see the growth and the financial backing behind all these operations and solar installations is extremely motivating and a sign of great things to come for renewable energy.”