Staff Profile

I joined the Office of Academic Affairs at The School for Field Studies in early 2017. Prior to joining SFS, I was a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program at Wellesley College, where I taught courses on food systems, tropical agroecology, botany, and writing. Much of my teaching utilized examples from Latin America, where my research is based.  I also have experience researching and developing innovative pedagogies and effective student evaluations for the sciences. While at Wellesley, I initiated the Science Pedagogy Working Group, an affinity group for faculty interested in innovative pedagogy, sharing resources, and rethinking how we approach science education more generally.

My experience in SFS-Kenya ’01 started me on my career path investigating human-environment relationships using transdisciplinary approaches. My research and teaching interests include agroecology, social and environmental justice, participatory action research, innovative science pedagogy, and biodiversity conservation. I received my PhD in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Vermont in 2013. For my dissertation research, I collaborated with coffee cooperatives in northern Nicaragua to explore biodiversity conservation and farmer decision making, asking how the ecological landscape interacts with the social landscape across coffee systems. Returning to SFS as the Dean provides the opportunity to work with our faculty on questions regarding agroecological landscapes as well as pedagogical approaches.

Research Interests

In general, I ask questions about how management decisions respond to and modify ecological and social landscapes. As a doctoral student I investigated management decisions of cooperatively organized coffee farmers in Nicaragua, and the effects of these decisions on shade tree conservation. Using a Participatory Action Research approach, I developed the project in collaboration with producers and cooperative administrators to ensure outcomes useful to the community. Methods included tree surveys and farmer interviews to empirically engage with both natural and social science factors contributing to this complex system. I found that although shade tree densities declined over a ten-year period, species diversity did not. Interviews revealed farmers utilize their social networks to make management decisions, suggesting a tension between a collective value in maintaining tree diversity in the long term and thinning trees to increase yields in the short term. This work contributes to agroecology by identifying the trade-offs facing smallholders who are simultaneously sustaining their own livelihoods through cash crop production, as well as conserving a biodiverse landscape. This work revealed several questions for future research, which I hope to pursue during my time at SFS.

Publications