Lisa Reyes Mason

Associate Professor Lisa Reyes Mason is a social worker, scholar, and advocate for climate justice. She finds purpose and passion in engaging social work—a profession in pursuit of health, equity, and social justice—in confronting the climate crisis to create a thriving and regenerative world for all.

Biracial and bicultural, Mason draws inspiration from her maternal roots in urban Philippines and paternal roots in rural California. On faculty at the University of Denver, Mason co-created a Master’s in Social Work (MSW) concentration in Ecological Justice, the first of its kind in the U.S. She also co-edited the book People and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Social Justice—a collection of lived experiences and case studies of climate injustice from the Global South and North—and serves the City and County of Denver as a member of its Sustainability Advisory Council.

Mason received her MSW and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Chancellor’s Fellow for advancing diversity in the professoriate and Olin Fellow for exceptional women to become leaders in society. Mason's BA is from the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in Folklore and Folklife, or the everyday knowledge of people and how wisdom and ways of living are passed from one generation to the next.

Mason is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in Guinea, West Africa, from 1998-2000. In Guinea, she learned Pulaar/Fulani, a language whose greeting response, “Jam tun,” means “Peace only.”