Nadia B. Ahmad is a tenured Professor of Law at Barry University School of Law where she focuses on environmental law, climate justice, and emerging technologies. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at Yale University, where her research examines disaster law and multi-hazard resilience. At Barry Law, she serves as Coordinator of the Environmental & Earth Law Certificate Program and teaches property, energy law, and environmental regulation with her work situated at the convergence of legal scholarship, data science, human rights, and environmental governance.
Professor Ahmad has written over 50 law review articles and book chapters addressing energy siting, sustainable development, carceral geographies, loss and damage, and environmental federalism. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including the Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum, Virginia Environmental Law Journal, University of Miami Law Review, William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review, Kansas Law Review, and Fordham Urban Law Journal. She also serves as co-editor of the Land Use and Environmental Law Review (Thomson Reuters) and co-author of Environmental Justice: Law, Policy & Regulation (Carolina Academic Press). Her doctoral dissertation, “The Emergence of Evacuation Science,” presents an interdisciplinary framework to enhance hurricane evacuation preparedness and risk communication through the integration of law, machine learning, and environmental science.
She holds several advisory and board positions, including serving on the Committee of Scholars for the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum, the Academic Advisory Group for the International Bar Association's Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law, and the board of the Sustainable Development Strategies Group. She is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University. Additionally, she serves as an official expert for the International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation (INBAR) Taskforce on Bamboo for Renewable Energy and served as an official observer for the American Bar Association to COP28 in Dubai in 2023.
Professor Ahmad’s educational background includes degrees from UC Berkeley (B.A. in Comparative Literature with high honors), University of Florida Levin College of Law (J.D., Virgil Hawkins Fellowship recipient), University of Denver Sturm College of Law (LL.M. in Environmental and Natural Resources Law), and Yale University (M.Phil.). She has also completed advanced certifications in geospatial analysis, AI and machine learning, and higher education leadership from NASA, MIT, and Harvard respectively. Her work has been supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Yale, and she was recognized by the Orlando Business Journal as a 40 Under 40 honoree and elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2017.
Her experience spans both academic and practical work, having previously served as a Legal Fellow with Sustainable Development Strategies Group on projects in Afghanistan, Mali, and Mozambique, advised on offshore drilling laws for Sierra Leone through the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University, and worked for a multinational oil and gas company and in private law practice in Florida. She has presented her research internationally and served in various leadership roles within professional organizations, including as Co-Chair of the Environmental Justice Task Force for the American Bar Association. She was previously Chair of the Younger Comparativists Committee's Linkages and Engagement Advisory Group of the American Society of Comparative Law, Chair of the Florida Bar’s Media and Communications Law Committee and a Board Member of the City and County of Denver’s Human Rights and Community Partnerships Advisory Board. Her work focuses on developing tools, frameworks, and strategies that support frontline communities while advancing legal innovation in environmental governance.
