Lab Group
I will join the faculty of the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at UC Berkeley in July 2027 and will be building my research group there.
We study how cultural values, ecological knowledge, and land use shape climate adaptation and environmental governance, with research centered in California and the North American West. Climate adaptation is never value-neutral. The institutional frameworks guiding environmental governance embed particular ways of valuing land, often at the expense of the communities most affected by ecological change. Some of the questions we ask: What values do communities hold toward the landscapes they care about? Whose values count in decisions about the future of those landscapes? And what models exist for meaningfully including those values in environmental stewardship?
This work is grounded in community-engaged research practices and long-term ethnographic research. We spend years in the places we study, working alongside communities to understand how people know, use, and care for the land, and how those relationships shift under environmental, social, and political change. The methods we use are diverse and span ethnographic fieldwork, mixed-methods social science, and spatial analysis to understand how values shape the ways people relate to land and how those relationships intersect with governance. Our research partnerships include collaborations with Indigenous nations, rural communities, agricultural producers, community-based organizations, policymakers, and land management agencies.
Joining the Lab Group
Prospective graduate students: I am recruiting graduate students who would begin at Berkeley in fall 2027. If you are interested in working with me, you can apply to the ERG graduate program. ERG admits students to the program and advisors are assigned after admission based on research interests. Information on requirements, deadlines, and funding is available on the ERG graduate program page. If your interests align with the group's research, you are welcome to be in touch with me. I will follow up with those whose interests are a close fit. Contact is not required and has no bearing on admissions decisions, which are made by the ERG admissions committee. You are welcome to apply whether or not we have corresponded.
Prospective postdoctoral scholars: I do not currently have funded postdoctoral positions, but I welcome inquiries from prospective postdocs interested in developing a project for external funding. Relevant fellowships include the USDA National Institute of Food & Agriculture Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship at Berkeley, and National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. For more information on being a postdoc at Berkeley, please see: https://vspa.berkeley.edu/
Prospective undergraduate researchers: I will have opportunities for undergraduate research assistants once I am at Berkeley. Details will be posted here closer to my start date.
Current Research Focal Areas
The research group is organized around three connected lines of inquiry:
Climate vulnerability, land use, and governance. How do histories of displacement, exclusion, and uneven development shape the distribution of climate risk? We examine how land tenure, dispossession, and institutional marginalization have produced landscapes where the communities with the deepest knowledge of the land often hold the least power over its future, from Indigenous homelands on public lands to agricultural communities navigating water scarcity and a changing climate.
Cultural values in environmental stewardship. How do communities understand their obligations to the land, and how do those value systems get incorporated into, or excluded from, governance decisions? We use the concept of moral ecology to analyze how cultural values become embedded in institutional practice, shaping what counts as knowledge, what gets measured, and whose priorities are reflected in stewardship outcomes.
Community-led climate adaptation. How can adaptation planning be restructured to center the knowledge and priorities of the communities most affected by ecological change? We develop and study co-produced tools and frameworks that make cultural values visible in environmental decision-making, and we examine the institutional conditions under which collaborative stewardship succeeds or fails.
Grounded in environmental anthropology, human-environment geography, and the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences, the group integrates qualitative and quantitative methods, including ethnography, interviews, focus groups, survey research, community science, participatory mapping, spatial analysis, and archival research, to study environmental change across disciplinary boundaries. We train students in these methods through field-based learning and partnerships with the communities at the center of our work.
Current projects are based in California and the Great Basin, including Indigenous forest stewardship in the Sierra Nevada, agricultural land-use change in the San Joaquin Valley, and frameworks for integrating cultural ecosystem services into land management across the North American West. While current projects are centered in that region, I welcome students whose work extends these questions to other landscapes, communities, and places.
The group is committed to research that is accountable to the communities it engages and contributes to scholarship while generating tools, data, and relationships that serve community-defined needs.
