For Rebecca Panko, a biologist at the EPA and City College alum, school was not always for her. Despite coming from a family of park rangers and having a passion for nature, her journey to becoming a scientist was anything but clear cut. “During my teenage years and even in my early 20s I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Panko said. After dropping out of high school, her early career was littered with a series of jobs including fashion photographer, dog-walking and working retail.
“I just felt like the types of jobs that I was getting were not very satisfying and didn’t have a lot of growth potential,” Panko said.
Eventually, knowing she wanted to pursue a career in biology, Panko returned to school and enrolled at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 2011, she transferred to City College.
“I kept coming back to this love of plants and love of the natural world,” Panko said. “For what I wanted to achieve I knew I needed to go back to school.”
During her time at CCNY, she was part of the City College Fellowship, geared towards undergraduates interested in pursuing a higher-level degree. She was also selected for the Partners For Change Fellowship as an urban sustainability fellow, a program offered through the Colin Powell Center for Leadership and Service.
Through the help of her advisor, Dr. Amy Berkov, Panko learned that through doing research as an undergraduate student she could potentially skip a master’s degree and enroll directly into a doctoral program. Ultimately, she was accepted by the combined biology program at Rutgers University – Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) where she obtained her PhD in Biology. From there, Panko completed her postdoctoral research at Michigan State University in Dr. Emily Josephs’ Lab. In 2022, she became a Science and Technology Policy fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science which paired her with the EPA.
“I didn’t finish high school in the traditional manner and so I always say from GED to PhD, it’s a big accomplishment,” Panko said.
Panko was onboarded as a full-time employee in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development in 2024. In this role, Panko looked at the impacts that urban environments have on human health, such as heat island effect (when areas experience hotter temperatures within a city than surrounding areas). This work aimed to inform urban climate adaptation strategies including greenspace and other nature-based solutions, serving as a resource for urban planners, local communities, and policy makers. In an upcoming publication, Panko and her colleagues present their evidence of how nature-based solutions impact both mental and physical health of urban communities.
“We read the titles and abstracts of over 5,000 papers to synthesize what the state of the literature is for things like green space and blue space, and how those things and access to those things helps certain health endpoints, particularly in what are called more vulnerable populations,” Panko said.
In the summer of 2025, the EPA announced a reduction in force that largely impacted the Office of Research and Development, and Panko was transferred to the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention’s pesticides program. There, Panko aids in the registration process through which every pesticide in the United States must undergo. “Working in the federal government over the last year and a half has been very stressful,” she said. “But meeting new people, working with new teams, that part has been really exciting,” she said.
Despite the challenges, Panko is grateful to continue her career as a federal civilian employee and appreciates the work in her new role.
“You always know that the priorities are going to change depending on the administration. And so you have to be able to do good work, but also be able to adapt and be flexible. I’m happy to say that I still have a job with the federal government.”
Yadira Gonzalez is a graduate of Baruch College where she studied journalism and minored in film. She was an editor-in-chief of Baruch’s award-winning magazine Dollars and Sense. Her writing has also been published in Documented, The New York Review of Books and AdAge.