Current Members
Nikhil Anand
EnviroLab Director & Daniel Braun Silvers and Robert Peter Silvers Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change, and addresses their relations by researching the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City (Duke University Press 2017), examines the ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. In 2018, Nikhil published a coedited volume (with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta), The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press 2018). His forthcoming book Amphibious City (under contract with Duke University Press) provincializes the historical and ongoing worlds made by urban planning to show how its infrastructures have produced and intensify an unequally borne climate crisis.
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 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
Kevin a full-time lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation research was an ethnographic study of industrial pine plantations across the US South and the sciences that manage these plantations. His 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 his work 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.
Sooah Kwak
Envirolab Coordinator | PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Sooah's research focuses on leprosy settlement villages in South Korea, where she is interested in the containment infrastructures built to manage disease and waste. 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. She writes about her work on sooahkwak.com.
Austin Miles
Envirolab Coordinator | 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.
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.
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 Candidate, 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.
Heidi Cooke
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Heidi Cooke is a first-year doctoral student in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research sits at the intersection of economic and environmental anthropology, examining the subjectivities of environmental accounting using linguistic methodologies, such as how ecosystems and biodiversity come to be rendered legible within economic and accounting categories. She maintains a broader interest in environmental governance and institutional design, and has previously conducted and published research on NFT traders.
Alessandra Dominguez
PhD Student, AAMW, University of Pennsylvania
Alessandra Dominguez received her B.A. in Anthropology and Honors Art History from the University of Texas at Austin (Spring 2023). Alessandra’s areas of research are concentrated in the ancient Middle East, where she focuses on human-environmental interactions and how changing environments influence ideas of landscape and material production. Her dissertation focuses on reconstructing ancient agrarian practices, with a special emphasis on the development of oasis agriculture in the third millennium BCE at Bat, Oman. To execute this research, she is specializing in archaeobotany, specifically carpology and phytoliths.
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.
Yaashree Himatsingka
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Yaashree is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on Adivasi lifeworlds in the monsoon forests of central India, particularly how Gond and Baiga communities navigate climate coloniality and ongoing conservation displacement. She is interested in climate anthropology, political ecology, and collaborative and multimodal forms of ethnography. Prior to Penn, she studied climate and society at Columbia University and history and environmental science at Princeton University, alongside working as an environmental writer and photographer.
Vinita Govindarajan
PhD Student, Urban Planning, Columbia University
Vinita Govindarajan is a PhD Student in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York
Shuhao Liang
PhD Student, History, University of Pennsylvania
Shuhao Liang is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History, working on the environmental history of borderlands. His interest is pastoralism — grass, herds, and the people who move with them — and what happens when a state sets out to count, settle, and administer a way of life organized around movement.
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.
Sita Mamidipudi
Climate Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania
Sita Mamidipudi is an environmental anthropologist interested in the intersection of climate precarities, environmental dispossession, and property relations in India. Her research is based in the Little Rann of Kutch, a region along the Western coast of India usually flooded by rainwater and the sea during the four months of the monsoon, and a saline desert for the rest of the year as the water recedes. Sita has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Moriah McKenna
PhD Candidate, 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.
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 urban life. Interested in the ecological interactions between people, plants, and the city, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to urban research that integrates planning, anthropology, and economics. At Penn, Tiffany’s doctoral research focuses on urbanization and global environmental change in developing cities of Indonesia. 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.
Nick Simpson
MD/PhD Trainee, Anthropology and Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Nick Simpson is a first year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, training jointly at the Perelman School of Medicine. He is interested in environmental toxicity in the Ecuadorean Amazon, and how Indigenous political responses to such toxicity go beyond State and biomedical conceptions of “Environmental Health.”
Clara Secaira
PhD Candidate, 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.
Jay Prakash Sharma
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania
Jay Prakash Sharma is a cultural anthropologist with a research focus on afterlives of extraction, caste and bureaucracy, indigeneity, and citizenship. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Syracuse University. His doctoral research examined the long-term social and political consequences of limestone mining in Jharkhand, showing how extractive development shapes social life and political subjectivity while producing new forms of inequality and exclusion. By tracing how Adivasi communities engage with development programs, state institutions, and extractive industries, his work contributes to broader debates on citizenship, democracy, development, and governance in contemporary India.
Sofie Sogaard
PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Sofie is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where their research focuses on the novel encounters that occur between people, plants, microbes, and material culture in Kalaallit Nunaat in response to a warming climate. They are interested in multispecies relationships, transdisciplinary anthropology, ecological and cosmological knowledge production, and decolonizing research methodologies. Prior to joining Penn, Sofie contributed to research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and worked as a corporate archaeologist.
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.
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.
Ann Wang
PhD Student, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Ann's current research examines the expansion of media infrastructures in extreme weather zones under "Global Asia", with particular attention to how these projects intersect with geopolitical tensions among nation-states and transnational tech/industrial corporations. Prior to UPenn, she briefly worked in the tech industry as an APAC ads specialist.
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.
EnviroLab Alumni
Shilpa Dahake, Co-founder & Urban Practitioner at Urban Dialogue, India
Jenny Lindblad, Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Nandita Badami, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany
Elizabeth Bynum, Researcher at Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, USA
Fatima Tassadiq, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, UK
Danielle Falzon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, USA
Pooja Nayak, Postdoctoral Lecturer and Researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Germany
Indivar Jonnalagadda, Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA
Dana Burton, Faculty Fellow in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University, USA
Jane Robbins Mize, Assistant Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Luna Sarti, Instructor at Texas Christian University, USA
Raka Sen, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Arizona, Phoenix, USA
Amrita A. Kurian, CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Pablo Aguilera del Castillo, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology Department, Trinity University
Matt Barlow, Technical University of Munich
Carolina Angel Botero, Anthropology PhD.
Nipun Kottage, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
Xiao Schutte Ke, Anthropology PhD.
Noa Mori Machover, Dual Masters Candidate in Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture.