At GDS:
• Cum Laude Society
• National Spanish Honor Society
• Environmental Club
• Student Council, Freshman and Senior Class President
• Basketball and Volleyball
After GDS:
• BA in Journalism and Mass Communications, UNC-Chapel Hill
• MPA in Environmental Science & Policy, Columbia University
• Rotary World Peace Fellow, University of Queensland (Australia)
• Served in the U.S. Peace Corps (1998-2000)
• Married with two children
While she was a student at Greensboro Day School, Sallie became interested in environmental issues and joined the environmental club, which helped fuel her interest. In the 7th grade, she learned about the Peace Corps and decided then that she would participate in that program. After earning her degree from UNC, she joined the Peace Corps and spent the next two years in Honduras working in rural villages to build potable water systems. From there, Sallie joined a Washington DC-based international development firm that sent her to Bolivia, where she spent three years supporting small-scale farmers and cooperatives in their efforts to access markets for their goods.
Sallie returned to graduate school to specialize in environmental policy, followed by studies in international relations as a Rotary World Peace Fellow, which led to a new professional focus in the field of international climate change policy. After a brief stint in Bonn, Germany at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Sallie took a job at Germany’s Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in their Climate Protection Program. At GIZ, she worked for more than five years as a climate policy advisor to the German government and its developing country partners. In 2013, Sallie and her husband relocated to Zurich, Switzerland, where they continue to reside with their daughter and son. Sallie continues to work in the field of climate change, most recently taking a position at a Swiss consulting firm as a climate change project leader.