Abigail Fitzgibbon

Abigail is a first-year PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) and a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Her research focuses on the climate impacts of food systems and agriculture’s potential as a climate mitigator. Currently, she studies enhanced rock weathering (ERW) on croplands, a nature-based carbon removal strategy. She aims to translate earth science into actionable climate investments and policies. She is co-advised by Steve Davis (Earth System Science) and Jane Willenbring (Earth and Planetary Sciences).

Before Stanford, Abigail earned her masters in Environmental Policy, concentrating in agriculture and economics, from Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs, where she was an Eiffel Excellence Scholar. While there, she worked with Flux, a startup scaling carbon removal in Kenya. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Kazakhstan with the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, where she supported U.S. agricultural trade policy and occasionally sampled camel milk. Additionally, she worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, researching food commodity markets in West Africa.

Before graduate school, Abigail spent two years at Esri as a product engineer, using machine learning to study the effects of climate variability on U.S. crop yields. She holds a bachelor’s degree in physical geography and geospatial science from UCLA.

Originally from the North Shore of Massachusetts, Abigail grew up working on farms and getting lost in the woods around her house—early experiences that continue to shape her curiosity about the intersections of land, food, and climate.