Dara Albrecht

Dara Albrecht
Research Associate

Dara Albrecht joined the Environmental Law Institute as a Research Associate in August 2023, completing her term in July 2025. During her time at ELI, she contributed to ELI's Climate Judiciary Project, the Global Marine Protected Areas project, the Platform to Protect Environmental Defenders project. She also contributed to the Environmental Law Reporter, the Belize Fisheries Project, and ELI’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Evaluation. Dara also served as the Research Associate Recruitment coordinator for two years and supported other hiring processes through the organization. Dara was also the host of ELI's flagship podcast, People Places Planet. Prior to joining ELI, Dara pursued desert ecology research at the University of Sydney in Australia and served as a reviewer and writer for articles published in “Biodiversity Islands: Strategies for Conservation in Human-Dominated Environments (2022).” She co-authored “The biogeochemical boomerang: Site fidelity creates nutritional hotspots that may promote recurrent calving site reuse,” published in August 2024.

Other work included translating the Reef Environmental Education Foundation’s citizen science material to Spanish to increase accessibility for Latinx communities and leading conservation planning projects with the US Forest Service and California Bureau of Land Management. Dara is a two-time awardee of the Richter Fellowship, and is also a Curtis Travelling Fellow, Bruce M. Babcock Travel Research Fellow, and Tetelman Fellow for International Research in Sciences. Dara is passionate about using science to develop successful conservation planning and shape policy. As a Peruvian citizen with roots in the Amazon, she is an advocate for cross-cultural environmental collaboration and developing just solutions for vulnerable communities who are impacted by climate change.

Dara is a 2023 graduate from Yale University with a B.S. in Environmental Science with a concentration in Biodiversity and Conservation. After her research associate role, she will be pursuing a J.D. at the American University Washington College of Law. Her senior thesis was an independent research project focused on the stoichiometry of caribou diet across Newfoundland and its conservation implications. Dara would like to honor with gratitude all the ancestral stewards of this land, past and present, and acknowledge the ancestral and unceded native territory on which ELI sits today.