Current Members
Nikhil Anand
EnviroLab Director & Daniel Braun Silvers and Robert Peter Silvers Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on the relations between cities, infrastructures, and the environment. He explores these processes by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His new book project, Urban Seas, examines how the climate changed city is being navigated by fishers, scientists and planners dwelling in Mumbai..
Kristina Lyons
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
Kristina Lyons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania with over twenty years of experience conducting participatory action research in South America, mainly in the Colombian Amazon. Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and the Spanish translation in 2021 by the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia. Her research interests include socioecological conflicts, feminist and decolonial science and technology studies, and public engaged scholarship. She has also worked on the creation of documentary films, soundscapes, street performances, photographic essays, graphic novels, community radio programs, digital storytelling platforms, and various forms of literary and journalistic writing. She is the cofounder of the nonprofit organization Colectivo Ríos y Reconciliación, and guardian of a citizen society nature reserve restoring tropical forest and protecting a microwatershed of the Amazon River Basin in Putumayo, Colombia called La Hojarasca.
Kevin Burke
Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
I am a full-time lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and my research centers on the cultural politics of forest science. My dissertation research was an ethnographic study of industrial pine plantations across the US South and the sciences that manage these plantations. My current project is a study of ghost forests, which are coastal forests characterized by the synchronous mass death of trees due to climate change and saltwater intrusion. Beyond the daily practices of plantation management and the monitoring of saltwater, the larger objects of analysis in my projects are the profusions of human and more-than-human social lives that are made and unmade in the wake of industrial pine plantations in the US South, the affective landscapes of hope and dread that accompany the draining and saturating of land, and the politics of temporality.
Adwaita Banerjee
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Adwaita is interested in plastics and its relationship with humans within urban ecologies. As part of his doctoral research, he is studying the flows of the material in the city of Mumbai, India. Prior to joining Penn, Adwaita had been a part of civil society organizations where he worked on issues of habitat, urban knowledge systems and data democratization.
Gustavo Valenzuela Merino
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Gustavo Valenzuela is a Chilean Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and a master’s degree in Latin American Anthropology from Alberto Hurtado University, Chile. Since 2020, he has been exploring the life experiences of people living at the peripheral forest–urban interface in Valparaíso, a metropolitan region in central Chile that is permanently affected by forest and urban fires.
Tayeba Batool
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Tayeba’s research focuses on the politics of climate change, urban ecologies of forest-making, and more-than-human relations in urban Pakistan.
Vivian Bi
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Vivian’s research in Hainan is interested in how the everyday relations that circulate through, between, and beyond the intergenerational household, the village collective, and the shareholding corporation come to animate new modes of urban-rural fissure, form, and futurity in and of late socialist China.
Kamalini Hegde
PhD Student, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Kamalini’s doctoral project is on rural cooperatives in Karnataka, South India where she is interested in the interface between agrarian society, politics and culture in South Asia.
Sofie Sogaard
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Sofie's is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where their research, based in Greenland and the broader Arctic, is focused on the the novel encounters that occur between people, plants, microbes, and material culture in response to climate change. They are interested in muti-species relationships, trans-disciplinary anthropology, ecological and cosmological knowledge production, and decolonizing research methodologies.
Rebecca Winkler
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Rebecca’s socio-cultural anthropology research draws on environmental anthropology, critical animal studies, and feminist science and technology studies. Her current project situated along the Thai/Myanmar border region collaborates with Karen indigenous communities, NGO leaders, conservation biologists, and animal welfare scientists addresing questions of care, reciprocity, and political and environmental sovereignty expanding beyond species boundaries.
Sooah Kwak
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Sooah is interested in the social, material, and technoscientific infrastructures built to isolate waste and other forms of disposability. By attending to moments of infrastructural failure, she traces how bodies and materials cast aside leak, endure, and reconfigure their place within constrained systems. Prior to joining Penn, Sooah contributed to research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and worked on humanities-centered AI initiatives in Korea.
Noa Mori Machover
Dual Masters Candidate in Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Noa Mori Machover is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher who explores diasporic entanglements of ecology, technology, and sociality. They listen for submerged narratives in familiar materials and landscapes, responding to the debris of climate and colonial crises with curiosity and care. They are currently pursuing a dual Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
Clara Secaira
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Clara, born and raised in Guatemala, is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are focused on environmental anthropology, water, infrastructure, multiple realities and algae blooms. Her previous research projects for both undergraduate and master’s degree have focused on understanding indigenous perceptions towards algae blooms in both Lake Atitlán in Guatemala and Lake Victoria in Kenya. For her dissertation project she would like to continue exploring these topics.
Evan Tims
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Evan Tims is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focuses on climate futures and water change in urban India. He is a Fulbright and Luce Scholarship alum, through which he spent over two years conducting research in India and Nepal. He also works on a variety of environmental and social initiatives alongside exploring experimental forms of ethnography, including climate fiction, speculative storytelling and collaborative design.
Tiffany M. Tran
PhD Candidate, City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania
Tiffany is a Vietnamese American architect and urban designer who is passionate about cities. Seeing cities as a social phenomenon, she approaches urban development from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates urban planning, economics, and anthropology. Tiffany has a decade of experience partnering with governments and private sector clients on urban policies, programs, and projects, including in Indonesia, Vietnam, Ghana, and the US. At Penn, Tiffany’s doctoral research focuses on urbanization and informality in developing countries of Southeast Asia. In particular, she studies how informal practices of coastal land reclamation in Indonesia, where communities construct new land for themselves using waste and found materials, relates to affordable housing and climate adaptation. After doctoral studies, Tiffany aims to continue creating new knowledge and informing public policy on the growth of cities in both practical and academic settings.
Jeanne Lieberman
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Jeanne Lieberman is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology. She is interested in the ways that seeds, scientific expertise, toxins, and different ways of narrating history circulate across the Américas, especially between urban and rural spaces. She approaches her work as an anthropologist, filmmaker and educator as interconnected components of this process of inquiry.
Moriah McKenna
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Moriah McKenna is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology concentrating in Archaeology. Her research interrogates how humans perceived, interacted with, and shaped landscapes in the past using geoarchaeological and paleoecological analyses. Previously, she conducted landscape archaeology research on stone piles associated with Colonial and Federal period farmsteads in the American Northeast. A member of the Penn Paleoecology Lab, her current research examines land-use regimes and infrastructures associated with agricultural intensification and socio-political transitions during the Neolithic and Iron Age in South India.
Xiao Schutte Ke
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Xiao is a linguistic anthropology PhD candidate working with (semi-)pastoralists in Amdo Tibet. She looks at how (semi-)herders transform their ecological expertise in spatial orientation, environmental perception, and affective attunement into conservation expertise while participating in China's citizen science and plateau conservation. She attends to intersectional asymmetries or injustice to marginal populations in China's recent turn to global ecological conservation. Additionally, she has a side project in Namibia looking at the gendered and racialized histories and presence of the culling and conservation of cape fur seals.
Austin Miles
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Austin is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests center around the interface between diverse environmentalisms in the context of watershed restoration in abandoned mine lands.
Vinita Govindarajan
PhD Student, Urban Planning, Columbia University
Vinita Govindarajan is a PhD Student in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York
Sowmya Vaidyanathan
Masters Student, Environmental Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Sowmya is a recent graduate from the Masters of Environmental Studies programme, where her researched exploreed human-wildlife conflict and forest management in a tiger reserve in Tamil Nadu. She is interested in questions of land use, multispecies relationships and the production of ecological knowledge, especially in Tamil culture.