Meet the Director - Center for the Urban Environment

Nicky Sheats, Ph.D, MPP, Esq., is the director of the Center for the Urban Environment at the John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research at Kean University, and has defined the primary mission of the Center as providing support for the environmental justice community on both the state and national level. Among the many issues Sheats is working on are particulate matter air pollution, climate change, cumulative impacts, developing legal strategies and increasing the capacity of the environmental justice community to address these and other issues. 

Sheats was a founding member of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA), the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum, the Environmental Justice and Science Initiative, the Building Equity and Alignment Initiative, the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform, the Coalition for Healthy Ports and an informal environmental justice attorneys group. He has held leadership positions within these organizations as well as within the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy. 

Early in his career, Sheats practiced law as a public interest attorney. During that time, he served as a law clerk for the Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (the local court); as a landlord-tenant and housing attorney at Camden Regional Legal Services; as a public defender in New Brunswick, New Jersey; and as a legal instructor at a community legal education and college preparatory program in Harlem. Sheats holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Princeton University, a master's degree in public policy, a law degree and a doctorate in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University.

In 2014, Sheats served as a co-author of the public health chapter of the National Climate Assessment. This report is issued every three to five years by the U.S. government and written by dozens of scientists convened by the same. He has been appointed to several federal and state advisory councils including the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the EPA’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and the New Jersey Clean Air Council. He is currently serving on the newly created White House EJ Advisory Council which is, in part, charged with advising the Biden administration on national policies and programs intended  to address environmental justice issues.

Over the years, in his capacity as Director of CUE, Sheats has received awards for environmental justice work from various organizations and institutions including GreenFaith, the New Jersey Work Environment Council, Clean Water Action, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the Black Scholar Awards Program at the University of Rhode Island and EPA Region Two and the state of New Jersey. In 2017, Sheats was recognized by Grist magazine as one of 50 people in the U.S. performing important environmental and environmental justice work. Grist honors 50 people annually.
 

For more information about the Center for the Urban Environment and to find out more about our work and mission, please contact:

Nicky Sheats, Ph.D, MPP, Esq.

Director, Center for the Urban Environment

John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research

Kean University

1000 Morris Avenue

Union, NJ  07083

nsheats@kean.edu