About

Proper Pronounciation

Milan: mi·la·n

Shrestha: shray-STAH

Biosketch

Milan Shrestha is a Teaching Professor and Deputy Director of Student Success in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Guided by the ASU Charter’s mission of ensuring accessibility to quality higher education, he is dedicated to making sustainability education relevant, rigorous, and impactful for students from diverse academic and life backgrounds. He provides academic leadership in curriculum design and instructional deployment across both in-person and digitally immersive learning environments.

Milan has played a key role in developing curricula that equip students to think critically about complex sustainability challenges, emphasizing systems dynamics, ethical reasoning, and future-oriented strategic actions. His instructional leadership supports programs that help students from all disciplines—not just sustainability—understand how environmental, social, technological, and institutional processes interact across scales and over time.

As an instructor, Milan teaches foundational sustainability courses alongside advanced seminars on climate and disaster risks. His pedagogy emphasizes research-informed learning through case studies, applied data analysis, and effective communications. He is deeply committed to inclusive teaching and the design of learning experiences that support student success across all modalities, with a particular focus on first-generation, nontraditional, and globally engaged learners.

Milan intentionally integrates research into his instruction, creating pathways for students to participate in collaborative, applied scholarship. Trained as an environmental anthropologist and sustainability scientist, he mentors undergraduate and graduate students on research teams that combine socio-economic insights with geospatial analysis. Through these experiences, students develop analytical, ethical, and professional skills while contributing to ongoing sustainability research.

His research examines the roles of shared cultural knowledge and institutions on smallholder agriculture decision-making, land‑use change, urban sustainability, and local responses to glacier change and climate risks, particularly in the Himalayan region. More recently, his work has expanded to local perceptions of glacier change and glacier-related hazards in high-mountains, particularly the Himalayan region. By combining community-based perspectives with geospatial analysis and cryosphere modeling, his research informs locally grounded climate adaptation strategies while strengthening sustainability curricula across immersive and digital platforms.