Sarah Federman, Ph.D.
Director of Landscape Decarbonization
Biodiversity + Forest Ecology and Management + Climate-smart Agriculture
Sarah leads Carbon Direct’s nature-based solutions group. As Director of Landscape Decarbonization at Carbon Direct, Sarah and her team work with clients to build equitable and rigorous decarbonization strategies focused on ecological resilience, biodiversity, and agricultural sustainability across food, fuel, and fiber value chains.
Dr. Sarah Federman has cross-sector expertise in analytics, agricultural sustainability, and the science underpinning biodiverse and resilient landscapes.
Dr. Federman contributed as a lead author and coordinator to R&D roadmaps for landscape resiliency and climate-smart innovation for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Chief Scientist. While at the USDA, she also supported a federal interagency R&D strategy with the Department of Energy focused on the circular carbon economy. In the private sector, Dr. Federman led, developed, and implemented data-driven continuous improvement frameworks for an indoor agricultural technology startup, as part of a broader strategy to enable responsible vertical scaling.
Dr. Federman has deep expertise in the ecological dynamics supporting the structure and function of tropical forests. Her work includes peer-reviewed recommendations for forest conservation and management of critically endangered species. She has managed multilateral teams and collaborations in Peru, Madagascar, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Dr. Federman holds a Ph.D. from Yale University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a M.S. in forest science from the Yale School of the Environment. Her graduate studies were supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Student Research Fellowship Program.
Education
PhD
Yale University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
MFS
Yale School of the Environment
BA
Barnard College
Awards
AAAS Science Technology & Policy Fellow, USDA Office of the Chief Scientist
John Spangler Nicholas Prize for best dissertation, Yale University Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
George Gaylord Simpson Prize, Yale Peabody Museum
National Science Foundation Graduate Student Research Fellow
Strachan Donnelley Student Award for outstanding thesis, Yale School of the Environment
Princeton in Latin America Fellow
Centennial Scholar, Barnard College
