Although the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment (CLEE) is at Berkeley Law School, Louise Bedsworth ’96, its executive director, isn’t a lawyer. With a master’s in environmental engineering and a PhD in energy in resources from Berkeley, she worked as a researcher and an advocate, and spent a decade as an appointed policymaker in the offices of California governors Edmund G. Brown and Gavin Newsom, before joining CLEE in 2021. Now she leads a multitude of interdisciplinary collaborations that reach into every aspect of environmental regulation. But she’s perhaps best known for projects funded by California’s strategic growth council when she served as executive director—projects that involved designing, creating, and evaluating community-scale climate action programs that have served as models for other cities, states, and nations.
