Today we proudly congratulate our 2025 graduating interns!
Colleen Dongarra and Rhiannon Williams, our Research and Education interns, and Emma Jo Donnelly, our Archival intern, have each made invaluable contributions to our work. We also extend our congratulations to all graduates, as well as to the families and friends who supported them throughout their journeys.
Colleen Dongarra worked with NCEJN during the summer of 2024 between her junior and senior year of college. As an intern she helped organize and lead Spidey Sens-r events by putting together sampling kits and improving our ability to re-collect webs. Colleen also conducted research and created graphs and maps for Dr. Madhu Katti’s presentation on the impacts of pipelines on wildlife at the Rights of Nature Tribunal put on by 7 Directions of Service. She also worked with Indigenous Memories to protect indigenous gravesites and represented NCEJN at the Protecting Mother Earth Conference in Cherokee, NC. Colleen will graduate with a degree in Environmental Health from UNC Chapel Hill and where she will be pursuing a Master’s degree in the Gillings School of Public Health.
Rhiannon Williams has worked with NCEJN since July of 2024 and will continue their internship throughout the summer. They have spearheaded our Spidey Sens-r web laboratory and statistical analyses. They presented their results to the North of the River Association this past semester, which has increased excitement around air monitoring. Rhiannon has also helped with our participatory events as a note taker. Throughout their internship, they’ve demonstrated their keen leadership skills by leading Spidey Sens-r sampling events, training other interns in the lab, and working as a volunteer coordinator at our 2024 annual summit. Rhiannon will graduate with a degree in Environmental Health and is applying to programs and jobs that will allow them to continue doing community engaged research.
Please join us in congratulating both Rhiannon and Colleen on their incredible successes and thanking them for their hard work!
Emma Jo Donnelly began working with NCEJN in the summer of 2024, and during that time she developed an archive and oral history project on the history of the EJ movement in North Carolina. Based on this research, she presented a community-based historical exhibit at the 25th annual North Carolina Environmental Justice Summit. She will be joining us again this summer to continue the work.
Last week, Emma graduated with her MA in Public History from North Carolina State University (NCSU) in May of 2025. At her graduation, she received the Outstanding Public History Award, an honor presented by the NCSU Department of History each year to one graduate student, in recognition of her academic and public-facing work. One of the projects that Emma worked on as a student was Remembering Oberlin’s Forests: The Deforestation of a Historic Black Community in Raleigh.
This fall, she will begin her doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she will continue her work as a community and oral historian whose work centers on grassroots labor and racial justice movements in the late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century United States.
Once again, a heartfelt congratulations to Emma, Rhiannon and Colleen, and thank you for all the great work you’ve contributed to NCEJN.
