When Erin Frank (CS’26) took her first official step onto Columbia’s Morningside campus as a student, she immediately reached for her camera. She had never visited before, committing to the program sight unseen, convinced by a course catalog that read like a dream scenario. That first walk across campus in August, everything green and verdant and older than anywhere she’d studied before, was a genuine revelation.
She pulled out her Nikon OneTouch and started snapping.
That instinct, to look closely and to document, is at the center of everything Frank does. A master’s student in the Columbia Climate School’s Climate and Society program, Frank came to New York from UC San Diego (by way of the northern suburbs of Chicago) with a conviction: climate change is fundamentally a story of the humanities as much as it is a scientific one.
She volunteers at the Olo Be Taloha Lab with Kristina Douglass, archaeologist and associate professor at the Climate School, where her work centers on knowledge co-production and environmental knowledge systems that Western science has often sidelined. Frank is currently working on a website of photographs from a recent trip to the Dominican Republic, exploring tourism in the Caribbean through multiple, sometimes uncomfortable, lenses.
To learn more about Frank and see her photographs, read this full story and interview on Columbia News.
