ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2025
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. This year, 60,000+ young leaders applied to join the Class of 2025 on 7,000+ campuses across 170 nations. 290+ campuses worldwide (less than 5%) were selected to host the 4,500+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT LAYASREE VEMMATA GOPI, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW AND CAMPUS DIRECTOR FOR THE CLASS OF 2025.
Ashoka University | Haryana, India | Advancing SDG 4 & UNAI 3
" I am excited to be a Millennium Fellow because it connects me with a community of passionate young change makers driven to solve urgent global issues. My motivation comes from witnessing the devastating impact of environmental racism and marine pollution on vulnerable communities especially as a researcher and diver. Through my startup Cool Equity, I strive to create accessible cold storage for small fishers and advocate for ocean protection as a means to address both environmental and social justice. My project is to document the flora on my university campus and potentially make it into a guide and definitely a digital book to help my community connect with the nature around us. The Millennium Fellowship empowers me to scale this impact and collaborate for a more equitable, sustainable future hence I'm very excited to be a Millennium Fellow. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Flora in and Around Ashoka University
For my project I aim to write the 'Flora In and Around Ashoka University' guide book which will act as a helpful tool to identify and learn about the flora inside and around our college campus through pictures and descriptions. I will conduct a tree survey using the transect method by dividing the campus into multiple transects, identifying the tree species in them and then tallying the tree count. Along with the trees, I will include horticultural plants consisting of a wide array of flowering plants, medicinal plants and food crops that constitute the landscape in and around Ashoka University. I want to write this book because I want to help the people in my community be it my fellow students, faculty, staff and residents of Asawarpur to learn about the nature that surrounds us and appreciate the ecosystem's value helping bring sustainability and environmental literacy mainstream. So that they can be educated about the flora around us and also be incentivised to help in the conservation efforts of the ecosystem as the landscape is currently undergoing mass destruction causing habitat loss for the birds and other fauna here as well such as the Nilgai which is Asia's largest antelope.
About the Millennium Fellow
Layasree Vemmata Gopi is a rising sophomore at Ashoka University in India, pursuing biology and environmental studies. With a passion for environmental conservation and social entrepreneurship, she draws inspiration from her travels and scuba diving adventures. Combining her love for the ocean and research in marine ecology, she founded Cool Equity—a startup providing decentralised cold storage to reduce seafood waste for fishing communities in the Global South. She is the youngest winner of the Monaco Ocean Protection Challenge 2025 and aspires to advance ocean protection and equity for vulnerable communities.
