Ashley Marie Smith

Ashley Marie, a former Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in economics at l'Universite de Geneve, now studies Environmental Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.  She was an assistant at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, where she developed resources on the political economy of Sudanese oilfields from October 2007-2008.  She now is a research assistant at the Center for Community Innovation (CCI), working on projects that examine the networks of renewable energy technology innovation and economic growth in California metropolitan statistical areas.

While at Eco-Innovations, she edited documents, compiled bibliographies on subjects including biostimulation of golf course turfs, and wrote the background to the May 2007 proposal on promoting sustainable consumption patterns.  She drew insights on European governance, social learning, international development, and organic farming from her diverse background working for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom human rights section in Geneva, Switzerland or as an agricultural volunteer at Heifer International's Overlook Farm in Holden, Massachusetts and the Center for Eco and Environmental Research in Bezaudun-sur-la-Bine, France.