The Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media is excited to share that PCSSM Student Researcher Bronwyn Patterson will receive the Fred N. Scatena Award for Research on Climate Change on May 2, 2025 from the Penn Earth and Environmental Science Department.
Bronwyn Patterson is a fourth-year undergraduate candidate for a B.A. of Environmental Studies with a concentration in Sustainability and Management. From Annapolis, Maryland, Bronwyn is the captain of the Women’s Varsity Track and Field team here at Penn. Aside from competing for Penn Track, she is also a member of the Sphinx Senior Society, a team representative for the Student Athlete Advisory Council (SAAC), and was a 2022-23 Undergraduate Fellow for the the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. She is interested in the overlap between finance and climate action, as well as sustainable investing that can support the clean energy transition for the decades to come. Bronwyn’s senior thesis partners the programming language R with ChatGPT 4o-Mini to capture how ExxonMobil’s climate-change related discourse has changed over time, specifically within the last decade (2015-2024). Specifically, her research employs automated text analysis to quantify the number of press releases from ExxonMobil that include the linguistic “market levers” frame, which includes a range of phrases and diction that address climate change and/or its market risks. Her work aims to address a critical lack of extensive research into the fossil fuel industry’s public facing communication via automated text analysis, and will be used to establish connections between regulatory frameworks, financial risk, and climate communication in the energy industry. Bronwyn’s senior thesis project is an offshoot of a larger doctoral project by Annenberg School for Communication PhD Candidate Julia Cope.