From the Navy to Nuclear Power, Sarah Claudy Lemonick, MPP’19, Charts a New Path With a Harris Education

In 2019, Sarah Claudy Lemonick, MPP’19, conducted extensive research with Assistant Professor Austin Wright to learn more about migration trends. Using wave height data, Claudy and her team discovered that smugglers’ decisions to facilitate crossings from northern Africa to Italy were more influenced by sea conditions than by regional conflict.

The insight prompted other insights. “We can now assume that they won’t attempt to bring a group of migrants across the Mediterranean unless it is safe,” says Claudy, who is also a 2017 graduate from the United States Naval Academy. “They’re saying, ‘Wait on the shore for a week, and we’ll attempt it then.’”

For some, this may be little more than an interesting footnote from an education in public policy, useful trivia for dinner parties. For Claudy, however, it was a precursor of things to come.

Two years later, she was serving on a naval ship in the Mediterranean when she saw something in the distance. “I'm scanning the horizon with binoculars,” she recalls. “And I'm like, ‘Hey, captain, I think there's a raft out there.’” It was a small group of northern African migrants floating in a precarious vessel. The team spent 11 hours coordinating with the migrants and the Algerian Coast Guard to ensure the group’s safety. “I knew that this was a reality,” Claudy said. “But to see it in real life, and to see them eye to eye, it was moving.”

Claudy’s upbringing in a military family—her father served as a Master Sergeant in the Marine Corps—instilled in her the ideals of patriotism and duty. After spending her formative years moving between Okinawa, Japan, and northern Indiana, Claudy’s Naval education took her everywhere from the Arctic Circle, where she monitored ice levels, to Israel, where she studied Arabic. After graduating from the Naval Academy with a degree in English, Claudy decided she wanted to translate stories and data into actionable solutions for societal challenges. “I felt like the best way to do that was studying policy, and understanding where gaps in the existing policy were not addressing the narratives that people were actually experiencing in their real lives,” she says.

At Harris, she honed her skills in both qualitative and quantitative analysis, often working to reconcile the two—a process she found intellectually invigorating. “It felt like a new set of tools I had never used before and that I still think about today,” she recalls. While citing Austin Wright and Kara Ross Camarena, AB’03, MPP’11, in particular as mentors, Claudy also treasured the opportunity to learn alongside, and from, a diverse set of open-minded students. “I could actually learn from people who I didn't necessarily agree with, which informed my own opinions,” she says. “Sometimes it feels great to change your opinion.”

At the same time, Claudy found that many of her new classmates had never interacted with anyone in the armed services. “I tried to show that we're not simply robots taking orders, but rather we're real people and we're all very different,” she says. “It was very important to me to be a good ambassador in that sense.”

After graduating from Harris in 2019, Claudy served as a surface warfare officer on the USS Harry S. Truman, a Navy aircraft carrier where she operated and managed nuclear reactors. “I personally think nuclear power is the future and the best climate solution that we have in terms of energy,” she says. “A reactor department joke is that the next Top Gun should be about the nuclear engineers on an aircraft carrier. Top Gun 3: The Source of Steam.” She adds, “But it'd probably be a much more boring movie than the last two.”

In 2024, Claudy made the bittersweet decision to transition out of the Navy, driven by a desire to reunite with her husband, who is pursuing medical studies in New York City, and to explore new career opportunities. She sees immense potential in nuclear energy as a climate solution and hopes to contribute to what she calls the "nuclear renaissance.”

Outside of her professional life, Claudy is an avid runner with a passion for painting—a hobby she cultivated in high school, which may surprise some who view people in the military as just taking orders. From designing wedding invitations with her own watercolors to decorating ship doors during her naval service, Claudy finds joy in artistic expression. “That has kind of fallen off for me while I've been in the Navy,” she says. “So I'm looking forward to returning to that—putting some paint on canvas again.”