UNE Sustainability Fellowship points business grad toward elite graduate program

When Scott Clemons-Baker graduated from UNE in 2025 with a degree in sustainability and business, he knew the field he wanted to work in — taking carbon inventories for businesses – but not how to get there. The UNE Summer Sustainability Fellowship showed him, providing Clemons-Baker with the tools he needed to pursue his area of interest, giving him a leg up even after he graduated.

Clemons-Baker’s 10-week summer fellowship tracking the City of Biddeford's carbon footprint turned into the launching pad for a career in corporate sustainability — and helped him join the inaugural class of Duke University’s Master in Business, Climate, and Sustainability program.

“It was a nice on-ramp into postgraduate work and getting my feet wet in the fields that I'm interested in,” Clemons-Baker said. "It was the starting point of building a network of like-minded professionals, not only with the peers that did fellowships alongside me, but also with people that have experience in the field.”

Since it was launched in 2024, the UNE Summer Sustainability Fellowship Program, which is offered to UNE graduates as well as UNE students, has grown from six fellows to 23. The number of UNE advisors assisting in the summer program — faculty and staff with expertise in business, sustainability, and research — also grew from two to eight. 

Moreover, the program’s overarching goal – to create an army of sustainably-minded leaders focused on tackling today’s most pressing environmental questions — has begun to take shape. 

That end-goal was envisioned by Cameron Wake, Ph.D., when Wake founded the fellowship program in his work as director of UNE North, the University's Center for North Atlantic Studies.

While not every graduate of the fellowship program reports back on their career journey and whether they continued to work in sustainability, a handful of examples of those who did stand out, including Clemons-Baker.

Scott’s personal journey exploring and then pursing work in sustainability is exactly the kind of career development I want to nurture in the Summer Sustainability Fellowship Program at UNE. While the program is still young, it quickly expanded to two dozen fellows because the demand for this work in Maine is so great." — Cameron Wake, UNE North director

“Scott’s personal journey exploring and then pursing work in sustainability is exactly the kind of career development I want to nurture in the Summer Sustainability Program at UNE,” Wake said. “While the program is still young, it quickly expanded to two dozen fellows because the demand for this work in Maine is so great.”

Wake noted that, of the 45 Sustainability Fellows who have graduated from the program thus far, several are employed in full-time jobs in fields related to their fellowship pathways.

Clemons-Baker was selected in the fellowship program’s second cohort working for the City of Biddeford under the mentorship of Brad Favreau, the city's economic development coordinator, who tasked Clemons-Baker with updating Biddeford's greenhouse gas inventory, which hadn't been revisited since 2021.

Clemons-Baker tracked down emissions data from across the city, including fuel and mileage records from the Biddeford Public Works Department's vehicle fleet, ridership data from the city's public bus service, electricity usage figures from Central Maine Power, and vehicle-miles-traveled estimates of both municipal and residential travel from the Department of Transportation.

The results weren't what anyone hoped for: Biddeford's emissions had risen since the last inventory, despite the city's climate action planning. Improvements in areas like heat pump adoption weren't enough to offset a rise in vehicle travel, Clemons-Baker said.

"Transportation is the biggest piece of emissions for a town like Biddeford," Clemons-Baker said. "It kind of confirmed a lot of the sustainability commission's predictions. But when we had that actual data, it made it real."

Clemons-Baker also was charged with building a clear process the city could repeat consistently in future years, a paper trail that an intern or future fellow could replicate to produce similar results quickly and effectively. 

When he presented his findings to Biddeford's Sustainability Commission at City Hall in August 2025, he knew the fellowship had significantly advanced his career goals. The end result was something Clemons-Baker could present to any business or graduate school as proof of his aptitude for producing a professional carbon audit.

"The fellowship really nailed down my desire to work in sustainability," he said. "It gave me the confidence that I do have the skills and the wherewithal to work within an environment where I'm doing a lot of data analysis and planning and envisioning climate action plans of the future."

In July, Clemons-Baker joined the inaugural class in Duke’s Master in Business, Climate, and Sustainability program created by Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Fuqua School of Business — what is believed to be the first program of its kind to bring two professional schools together. 

“Those of us who worked with Scott during his Sustainability Fellowship are so proud of the path this young man has taken,” Wake said. “He’s not just a great story of a UNE alum who is committed to solving some of today’s most complex problems, he’s a fine example of how, when you let students try out sustainability work, they just may adopt it as their road map to future pursuits.”