Diving Into the Business of Water

April 20, 2025

Brooke Lynn Elzweig

Master of Environmental Management, 2025

ConcentrationS:

Business and Environment; Coastal and Marine Systems

Employer:

Brackish Strategies, LLC

Role:

Founder and Principal

Since earning her MEM last spring, Brooke Lynn Elzweig has been chasing one question: how to bridge innovation and capital investment in marine and freshwater systems. Her answer is Brackish Strategies, LLC, a freelance consultancy that guides business founders from ideation to financing.

“My job is to be the connective tissue between a founder and the right investor, between a good idea and a story that actually lands. These sectors — oceans, capital, innovation — have been siloed for too long. They’re all talking from different rooms. I want to be in the hallway, bringing them together,” says Elzweig, who is based in Delray Beach, Florida.

Through Brackish Strategies, Elzweig works with a range of clients, from early-stage founders developing their pitch to fund managers cultivating investor relationships.

“No two engagements look the same,” Elzweig says. “They’re very bespoke.”

Her company’s name reflects a personal philosophy. “Brackish water is the in-between,” Elzweig explains. “It’s where salt and fresh water converge, and it’s actually its own distinct ecosystem. I’ve always felt most at home in that kind of threshold space — between science and business, between the field and the boardroom, between ��Ի�ܲ��ٰ��.”

Elzweig has already tested the waters with several clients in the ocean economy and ocean-adjacent industries, driven by a passion for marine systems. As an adolescent growing up in South Florida, she spent summers at a Sea Camp in the Florida Keys, and got scuba certified at 13.

After majoring in environmental engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, she received a fellowship to work with the nonprofit Coral Restoration Foundation, based in Key Largo, Florida, where she helped monitor and tend coral nurseries.

“It was a really special experience to be a field technician and to work in the environment that I was so passionate about,” she says. “There’s something that rewires you when you spend that much time underwater tending something that fragile. You stop seeing ecosystems abstractly. That [sensation] never left me.”

Elzweig later moved to Saudi Arabia for a year to work as a contractor on a commissioned by the Saudi prince. Participating in the ambitious initiative was “a light bulb moment,” she says. “When you use capital well to unlock large-scale projects, it’s really something remarkable.”

A scuba diver in a black wetsuit with a bright yellow tank hovers above a coral reef surrounded by a dense school of vivid orange and red anthias fish. The diver holds an underwater camera and exhales bubbles toward the surface. The reef below is covered in rounded coral formations, with deep blue water filling the background. Taken at Shushah Island, Saudi Arabia. — Elzweig spent a year assisting with a coral reef restoration project off the coast of Shushah Island, Saudi Arabia. *Photo by Jessica Levy and Karla Paola.*

Inspired, Elzweig dove further into the business of oceans through the MEM program, becoming the first Nicholas School student to concentrate in Business and Environment and Coastal and Marine systems.

“Duke gave me the framework to articulate what I’d been circling for years — that oceans and capital and innovation aren’t separate conversations,” she says.

Among her mentors, Elzweig highlights Nicholas School faculty members such as executive in residence and MEM alum Shannon Parker; assistant professor John Virdin, who also directs the Ocean Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability; and Jesko von Windheim, the Lynn Gorguze-Scott Peters Professor of the Practice of Environmental Entrepreneurship & Innovation, as well as Fuqua School of Business professor Dan Vermeer.

As a grad student, Elzweig also joined , a campus-wide community committed to ocean sustainability. In addition to helping plan the group’s annual , she served as co-president for a year.

But the Duke experience that stands out most, she says, was her final semester spent in Beaufort at the Duke Marine Lab.

“The classes felt so intimate, and we got so close with our professors, and I was so close with my cohort,” she says. “I think that’s really what was so special about Duke, was the incredible people I met.”

This article is part of a Nicholas Narratives series called “Earth Ambassadors,” which profiles alums from the Master of Environmental Management and Master of Forestry programs at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Find more profiles here.

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