Brown University welcomes its first professor of sustainable finance and investing

Even though Mark Tracy ’95 graduated from Brown with high salary offers from traditional banks and consulting firms, he chose to work in sustainability and agricultural rights.

He later explored various entrepreneurial endeavors, leading startups and managing billion-dollar investments. Now, almost 30 years after his graduation, Tracy has returned to campus to assume his newest role: the first professor of sustainable finance and investing at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Returning to College Hill has been a full-circle process, Tracy told The Herald. He was drawn back to Rhode Island after mentoring students and working with other Brown alumni to create startups, pointing to the creativity and flexibility of students.

A personal history was also at play: To Tracy, Brown “feels like home.”

“Especially after I lost both of my parents as a sophomore, I was living here full time,” he said. “There is a certain comfort here.”

This led him to pursue sustainability work despite offers for more financially lucrative positions. “It took me years to figure out why I chose this path,” he said. “I hated seeing people in a vulnerable position like I was when my parents passed away.” 

When working with farmers vulnerable to weather and food prices, he remembered thinking he “wanted to alleviate the unfairness.”

Tracy’s first job at the food company Cargill shaped his future career in sustainability. Working with farmers across five continents, Tracy learned to “use financial tools” and develop creative solutions. He also advocated for fair prices for farmers and protected vulnerable populations from food insecurity.

In 2018, Tracy became head of the finance leadership board at Indigo, a startup focused on food distribution, where he applied his previous experience at Cargill to help farmers adopt regenerative farming. He also co-founded EarthAcre with Viraj Sikand ’17 to support environmental conservation and restoration around the world and bridge the gap between hard science in climate studies and its practical applications for the environment.

“From these experiences, I observed that for a lot of environmental problems, we don’t actually have rigorous scientific backing,” Tracy said. “Take the example of the carbon market: Are companies actually offsetting the carbon they claim they have? Are the impact of these sustainability initiatives on the local people doing more harm than good?” 

These are some of the questions Tracy aims to answer as he shadows and lectures on food sustainability with Cary Krosinsky, adjunct lecturer in environment and society, in the class ENVS 1545: “The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Investing.” 

Open to every Brown student, the class focuses on evaluating a portfolio of companies with environmental initiatives, the investment trends in the sustainability space, as well as how to value nature. 

The class was created in response to protests throughout the 2010s that called for divestment from fossil fuels. It investigates how to connect theory and company strategies to current challenges. 

“From my experience, Brown is more focused on theory than career experience,” Krosinsky said. But “we try to show students how hard it is to push for sustainable change … and how to practically make an environmental impact.”

In IBES, Tracy is helping to develop the curriculum for more sustainability-focused classes — a goal laid out in the Institute’s 2023-2028 Strategic Plan. Tracy is also collaborating with Brown’s Center for Career Exploration to bring more internships and full-time opportunities for students looking to make an environmental impact.

“Professor Tracy’s addition to the IBES is really a culmination of a multi-year, student-driven process,” said IBES Director Kim Cobb, who noted that many students have requested sustainable finance courses across departments. 

Tracy is instrumental to the IBES’s future in sustainability, according to Cobb. 

“He’s the needle in the haystack.”