‘People will keep speaking his name:’ A&S donor Sue White’s planned gift for the School of the Environment in her husband’s honour

Sue White’s recent bequest for the Rodney White Environmental Studies Scholarship promises lasting support for outstanding undergraduate students at the intersection of environment and international studies. It’s also a lasting tribute to her husband, a beloved family man and globally respected U of T scholar who helped found what is now called the School of the Environment.

“It was important for me and my daughters to keep Rodney’s memory alive, that people will keep speaking his name,” says Sue, who founded the award after her husband’s death in 2012.

Professor Rodney White’s enduring legacy has inspired more than a dozen future leaders, including Lita Wanjiru Ngure, a fourth-year student pursuing a double major in environmental and peace, conflict and justice studies who was named a Rodney White Environmental Studies Scholarship recipient in 2025–26.

“Winning this scholarship enabled me to branch out into research I genuinely cared about,” says Ngure, an undergraduate research assistant with the International Centre for Tax & Development, which aims to improve tax policy and administration in lower-income countries through collaborative research. “I was learning about perspectives of Kenya I’d never heard of — and I grew up there.”

Ngure was born and raised in Nairobi before coming to Canada to pursue an honours bachelor of arts degree. A member of University College, she is a Dean’s List Scholar and the winner of several scholarships including a University of Toronto Excellence Award.

As a Jackman Humanities Undergraduate Fellow, her research argues that South African popular songs — about displacement, urban life and the mining industry's toll — serve as a more honest record of human geography across the continent than the testimony and record keeping of colonial settlers.

After she graduates from U of T this June, Ngure will pursue a master of philosophy degree in Anthropocene studies at Cambridge University’s geography department and aspires to one day teach higher education in Kenya. This career trajectory echoes the path of Professor White, her scholarship’s namesake and geography professor who first taught at Nigeria’s Ibadan University more than 50 years ago.

Professor White was a pioneer who linked climate change to its economic consequences — work that caught the attention of the insurance industry decades before it became mainstream. He came to U of T in the 1970s as a professor of geography with extensive fieldwork experience across Africa.

In 2005, he was named founding director of the Centre for the Environment, which became the School of the Environment in 2012. He led the merger of several environmental studies programs, creating a hub where scholars from economics, law, medicine and other fields could tackle pressing problems side by side.

“Rodney had a vision. He was one of the first people I met in academia who I would describe as a transdisciplinary scholar who wanted to bring people together,” says the school’s current director, Professor Steve Easterbrook. “His legacy is still very much part of our culture today.”

Sue fondly remembers the decades at her husband's side engaging with students and faculty in the U of T community — interactions that enriched their life together, she recalls.

“Rodney loved teaching,” she says. “He always said that he learned so much from his students.”