Stacy Godfreey-Igwe

About Stacy Godfreey-Igwe

Stacy Godfreey-Igwe grew up in Richardson, Texas, as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who made education a central part of their lives. Her parents met while working at a secondary school in Obowo, Nigeria, her mother as a teacher and her father as an administrator. Together, they modeled a commitment to learning and service that continuously shaped her family life. Finding home in a culturally diverse, low-income community, Stacy developed early awareness of structural inequality, particularly in how families, like her own, managed under the burden of severe Texas heat and high electricity costs. These experiences formed the basis of her lifelong journey seeking to address systemic inequities embedded in everyday systems.

Stacy went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a QuestBridge and Gates Scholar. At MIT, she studied mechanical engineering with a concentration in sustainable design and over summers pursued research opportunities abroad in India and South Africa, as well as at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota. As a Burchard Scholar, she went on to become the first student at MIT to complete a major in African and African Diaspora Studies. After graduation, she pursued a science policy fellowship in Washington, DC and interned at the Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, where she worked to broaden adoption of heat pump technologies across diverse stakeholders. 

Stacy is a current doctoral student in the joint Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). As a member of the inaugural CMU Rales Fellowship cohort, Stacy works with Professor Destenie Nock to study the impact of extreme heat on household energy use, particularly in vulnerable communities. Beyond her research, she organizes outreach and programming to support local underrepresented students in STEM and contributes to institutional efforts to expand access and belonging among graduate students. Stacy aims to be a scholar and advocate whose work, drawing on her personal experiences, informs equitable energy solutions.