Georgetown University will launch two master’s programs in environmental health and sports operations in Fall 2026, program leaders confirmed to The Hoya March 23.
The Master’s of Science in Climate, Environment & Health (CEH), a one-year degree at the Capitol Campus, will focus on the intersection of global health and climate policy. The Executive Master’s in Global Sports Strategy & Operations — a hybrid program in collaboration with the sports business school within Manchester City Football Club, a Premier League soccer team in the United Kingdom — will offer professionals an accelerated degree in sports management from Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies (SCS).
Both programs were first approved by Georgetown’s board of trustees in June 2025.
Jessia Kritz, a global health professor who co-designed the CEH program, said the program aims to teach students about the intersection of climate change and global health.
“The master’s program is an accelerated program designed for students who are interested in the intersection of environmental change with human health,” Kritz told The Hoya. “The focus of the program is collaborative problem-solving. So to distinguish this program from an environmental health program, for example, is the fact that the program is designed to explicitly teach students evidence-based processes, design and skill development, to resolve complex challenges at this intersection and conflict challenges.”
Bobby Goldwater, the faculty director of the sports strategy program, said the SCS developed the program in collaboration with Manchester City to offer high-level education in sports operations and management.
“There are challenges and opportunities in global professional sports and this is a landscape that just keeps changing and evolving, so our approach is going to be both comprehensive and accessible,” Goldwater told The Hoya.
The degree includes five remote courses on leadership, business operations, governance, emerging technologies and a capstone final project, as well as in-person residencies in Manchester, Washington, D.C. and New York City.
Kritz said that although the CEH program was initially intended for students with a background in environmental policy or public health, applicants without experience in either have also expressed interest.
“We all have lived experience with issues at the intersection of the environment and health,” Kritz said. “Some of us study that and some of us don’t. What we thought is really interesting is seeing the number of students who have come to the program because they have encountered natural disaster in their personal life.”
Clare Buckley (SOH ’24, GRD ’25), who helped plan the CEH degree as a research assistant, said the team behind the program wanted to create a master’s degree that was not available elsewhere, saying the majority of similar programs focus only on environmental health.
“I feel like we noticed washing out of the word ‘climate’ in our research,” Buckley told The Hoya. “I think the fact that we’re providing coursework that’s specifically about climate change sets us apart from some of the programs that just do environmental health.”
“It being a one-year program was also unique,” Buckley added. “We wanted to focus on affordability and access.”
Students in the CEH program will take courses on scientific methodologies specific to health and the environment, data visualization, policy design and management. Other universities, including Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University and Harvard University, offer graduate degrees in environmental health policy.
Goldwater said the SCS’s program will focus largely on global sports.
“We are certainly going to pay attention to football because we have the benefit of Man City,” Goldwater said. “That’s only where we begin. There are sports that have a global profile, so we’re also going to be investigating basketball, golf and tennis, a variety of different global sports and looking at different phases and segments of operations and strategy, how decisions are made, how different venues are managed, how different events are presented and the fan engagement that’s associated with them and how the business is run.”
Buckley said she is hopeful for the future of the CEH degree despite a shift in the higher education landscape caused by the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate grants and funding for science programs at universities across the U.S.
“Now international development and environmental health have become so politicized that I am obviously more pessimistic and sad about it, to be candid with you,” Buckley said. “But I think the purpose of the program and the fact that Georgetown was willing to invest and start this up anyway, is a testament to the fact that they are a very future-thinking university.”
CORRECTION: This article was updated March 27 to correct the spelling of Bobby Goldwater’s name.
