Lemir Teron is an associate professor at Howard University in the Department of Earth, Environment and Equity.  He holds a PhD in Energy & Environmental Policy from the University of Delaware and completed a NOAA funded postdoc at Florida A&M University, where he also taught at the College of Law.  

His work is committed to advancing public science and environmental justice, with research interests that include environmental health, energy policy and urban & community forestry.  

Dr. Teron has received numerous accolades, including: being awarded the 2019 Distinguished Faculty Member for Teaching Excellence Award by the SUNY ESF Undergraduate Student Association, being named a 2020 Unsung Hero at Syracuse University’s 35th Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration and 2022 a  Champion of Diversity award by the YWCA of Syracuse and Onondaga County (NY).  

Dr. Teron serves on the NY State Climate Impacts Assessment’s Energy Workgroup and he is a Member Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform.  He was named a 2022-2023 Nathan Policy Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.  

Why Unlearn Power?  

By the late 2010s my work increasingly focused on energy policy and I started thinking more deeply about climate inequality and the justice dimensions of the renewable energy transition.  

But for decades before this critical period, I had known that the end game — whether ecological or social — necessitates conditions in which systems that produce violence, disenfranchisement, displacement and are predicated on exploitation have to be upended.  So, just as societies have to rethink energy systems that undermine ecologies, we have to rethink, reshape and unlearn power -- political, social and economic -- which is predicated on exploitation, marginilization and inequality