Emily Okikawa

Emily Okikawa grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii surrounded by the beauty of the Hawaiian Islands. Her childhood spent exploring tidepools, snorkeling over the reef, and hiking in the mountains led her to appreciate the natural world around us at a very young age. After attending Punahou School, she went on to graduate from Franklin & Marshall College with a major in Environmental Studies, and a minor in East Asia Area studies.

As a previous summer intern at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency she has written about environmental issues and assisted in public outreach efforts in Flint, Michigan, inspiring her to specialize in stakeholder engagement. Beginning in Honolulu as a Nature Conservancy intern, her experiences have expanded to include a semester at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, to serving as a delegate in the 67th Japan-American Student Conference in Tokyo. Recently, Emily spent her final semester of her undergraduate career in Tokyo, Japan, focusing on her minor in East-Asia Area Studies, and completing an independent project on Environmental Justice issues in the Kansai Region.

Since majority of her time seems to be spent on plane rides to and from Hawaii, she hopes to one day combine her passions of traveling, languages, storytelling, and environmental sustainability to advocate for the health of our oceans.