2023 in Review: A Look at the Udall Center’s Last Year of Impact

Jan. 4, 2024
Craig Baker

Check out an interactive timeline of highlights as well as facts and figures about the UC's 2023 academic outputs.

A screeenshot of the UC's 2023 interactive timeline. Features an image of a spiral petroglyph on a rock in front of southern Arizona mountains. White text to the right of the UC logo reads "What was the Udall Center up to in 2023?" Smaller text below reads "Here are some of our favorite highlights from the past year."

Click here to view our interactive 2023 highlight timeline!

2023 was a big year at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. 

It was huge! Gargantuan! It’s hard to overstate the leaps we made in terms of outputs and engagement in the last year – and we’re just getting warmed up!

Over the past 12 months, we welcomed our first cohort of undergraduate Mo’s Policy Scholars, held our first-ever peer mentoring program for local middle school students, launched our quarterly newsletter, the Udall Digest, brought on a full-time communications person for the first time in the organization’s history and announced the first Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit to take place in southern Arizona (coming this spring!).

We formed new partnerships with state and federal government agencies, worked with scholars from around the world on a variety of research projects, broke records with January in Tucson attendance, leveled-up on our efforts to see agrivoltaic installations implemented at scale and launched a virtual tour of the Cienega Watershed. 

Our staff and faculty hosted diplomats and world-renowned experts, appeared in dozens of news outlets locally and nationally, contributed presentations to numerous conferences, summits and other professional gatherings and wrote hundreds of pages of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and more!

Check out our interactive timeline for a glance at what 12 months of work looks like at the UC and read on for a by-the-numbers breakdown of the Udall Center’s 36th trip around the sun!

2023 at the UC: The Numbers

For all the facts-and-figures people out there, we’ve got you covered. 

Here’s a snippet of the activities we were engaged in last year:

  • 92 Presentations
    • 52 on environmental policy issues
    • 40 by Native Nations Institute staff and faculty, including:
      • 31 domestic and 9 international presentations
      • 9 educational seminars
      • 3 Native Know-How Presentations
      • 6 Tribal Leadership training sessions
      • 2 summits for Tribal leaders
      • 1 training session on Native nation building for federal officials 
  • 57 Publications
    • 41 by Environmental Policy Program staff and faculty, including:
      • 22 peer-reviewed articles
      • 9 op-eds, essays and reviews
      • 7 reports and briefings
      • 2 book chapters
      • 1 anthology book
    • 16 by Native Nations Institute staff and faculty, including:
      • 9 peer-reviewed articles
      • 4 policy reports and communiqués
      • 2 op-eds
      • 1 book chapter 
  • 450+ seminar and educational session participants
  • 130+ collaborating institutions, organizations and agencies
  • 69 Tribes and Native nations served
  • 60+ media mentions and expert interviews
  • 16 public events

Publications we were featured in include:

  • LA Times
  • CNN
  • Christian Science Monitor
  • Vox
  • The Conversation
  • The Daily Beast
  • BBC News
  • High Country News
  • Popular Science
  • Newsweek
  • The Hill
  • Bloomberg
  • The Associated Press
  • Arizona Illustrated
  • UA News
  • KJZZ News

Thanks to all our supporters and collaborators who helped to make 2023 such a success. 

Stay tuned for updates – we’re ramping up for a busy and productive 2024!

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