Renée Skeete’s objective is to foster and launch mutually beneficial collaborations on her watch as community partnerships and grants lead at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE).

At Argonne, these partnerships become possible when research teams and stakeholder organizations come together on scientific efforts that will benefit a community’s wider goals.

Because expertise does not reside exclusively with research teams, she emphasizes the strengths that community-based organizations bring to these partnerships. ​“Access to the amazing scientific knowledge the laboratory produces, and funding to become collaborators in that work, are important to both address environmental harms and invest in the future-focused, climate resilience solutions that community-based organizations are already working on.”

Among the OCE’s newer staff members, Renée joined Argonne in September 2023. The OCE itself is a newer Argonne office, having been established in early 2023. It operates in two locations: the Argonne in Chicago office within the Hyde Park community on Chicago’s South Side and Argonne’s main campus in Lemont, Illinois.

Renée roughly divides her time between the Argonne in Chicago office and the lab’s main campus. ​“Working at the lab gives me the opportunity to meet with scientists, and working at Argonne in Chicago gives me the opportunity to meet with community partners to collaborate with those scientists.”

Prior to joining Argonne, Renée spent three years at ComEd in its engineering department. That’s where she became familiar with Argonne through collaborations on funding opportunities and other research projects, including the 2022 Climate Risk and Adaptation Study.

Renée pursued her graduate studies at Georgia State University for her master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology. Her concentration was in Race and Urban Studies, with a focus on housing and the built environment. Leaning toward applied work rather than an academic career, she ended up finding career opportunities through professional organizations such as the Urban Affairs Association and the American Planning Association.

While completing her doctorate, she became an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education research fellowship participant at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, building interest in climate and sustainability through her work on built environment approaches to improving public health. That’s how she had ended up in ComEd’s Engineering department despite not being an engineer.

“Joining Argonne was an opportunity to lean back into my identity as a scientist,” she said. ​“My sense of urgency about sustainability and equity is fueled by my academic research on disadvantaged neighborhoods and my ancestry in the Caribbean and South America, where climate change impacts are alarming, accelerating and disproportionate to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Contemporary inspirations include Dr. Tony Reames, Dr. Fayola Jacobs and Dr. Ashanté Reese. Two other towering inspirations are W.E.B Du Bois, an early sociologist, eminent scholar and thinker, and a pioneer in data visualization; and Ida B. Wells — one reason that Renée was excited to come to Chicago was to live where Ms. Wells had worked.

At Argonne, Renée can perform the functions she loved best in previous work — creating partnerships, working on interdisciplinary teams and finding resources to support underfunded work in marginalized communities.

She thus sees her role as one of translation: as a point person identifying what’s relevant to the researchers and to the community organizations. Although the OCE is in its infancy, she wisely observes, ​“We’re never really starting from scratch. The beauty of working in an interdisciplinary environment is that there is always something to build from, even if it comes from a different area of expertise. It’s an exciting time to be doing this work.”