Chelsea is a student in the evening program at Georgetown Law while she continues to work as Energy and Climate Policy Advisor at the Land Trust Alliance. Since moving to DC in 2014, she has woven together an early career in environmental policy at the U.S. House of Representatives Committees on Natural Resources and Transportation & Infrastructure and as a political appointee at the Department of the Interior during the Obama Administration. More recently she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia in the Linking Income, Food and the Environment (LIFE) program and explored the international development sector as a project management associate at Chemonics International.

Chelsea graduated from Brown University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology and a focus in ecosystems, evolution and the environment. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a semester backpacking across northern Tanzania learning about wildlife conservation and political ecology, a life- and career-defining experience. She then earned her Master of Natural Resources degree from the University of Georgia where she focused her graduate research on transboundary conservation in sub-Saharan Africa.

As an 8th-generation West Virginian (and former Miss West Virginia USA) she is a proud Appalachian and hopes to use her legal career to benefit rural poor communities like the one in which she grew up. She is passionate about environmental justice, climate change mitigation, and a just clean energy transition. In her spare time she enjoys competing in triathlons, being in the woods, and playing guitar badly.