Employee Profile
Janet Lawson
Renewable Energy Project Manager
Renewable Energy Coordination Office
Janet Lawson comes to BLM as a Presidential Management Fellow. She joins colleague Ashley Conrad-Seydah and Sarah Quinn, also Presidential Management Fellows and renewable energy project managers in the Renewable Energy Coordination Office in Sacramento.
The Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program was established in 1977 to attract outstanding men and women from a variety of academic disciplines and career paths to the federal service. By drawing graduate students from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, the PMF program provides a continuing source of trained men and women to meet the future challenges of public service.
During her two-year Fellowship, Janet will have an opportunity to rotate to another government agency or bureau. By participating in rotations, Fellows can gain management experience, work in specific occupational fields or learn about a program function from another perspective.
She got her start in environmental/land-use policy and management while doing a semester internship and research project with small coffee farmers in Costa Rica during college. In 2003-2004, she worked as an agricultural policy intern with the Rural Coalition in the District of Columbia. She graduated in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in foreign service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. The summer after she graduated, she worked as a policy analyst for the League of Women Voters of Illinois. She entered the Peace Corps and was sent to Misiones, Paraguay working with farmers to implement sustainable agricultural techniques and diversify their farms. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese, but while there, she learned to speak Guaraní, an indigenous language of South America, and one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), where it is spoken by 88% of the population.
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