I’m a researcher specializing in human-wildlife relations and conservation social science. A primatologist by training, I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont where I lead a project aimed at documenting and connecting Indigenous knowledge, values, and priorities surrounding Adikameg (lake whitefish) across the Great Lakes. I received my PhD from Yale University in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. My dissertation research combined ecological and ethnographic methods to examine the biocultural relationships between local people, great apes, and the larger swamp forest ecosystem they cohabited as well as the political repercussions on these relationships produced by the imposition of conservation management.

Broadly, I am interested in how socio-political and ecological processes intersect to produce place-based conservation outcomes for wildlife and people. I engage methods and theories that draw on work in political ecology, wetland/river ecology, primatology, human geography, and environmental humanities. My work increasingly centers around principles of knowledge co-production with local and Indigenous communities and, relatedly, the integration of plural value and knowledge systems into environmental policy and governance.

I have been involved in environmental and social research across tropical forest ecosystems in Madagascar, Indonesia, and the Republic of Congo, as well as in Atlantic Canada and the US. I am from Connecticut and currently live in Burlington, Vermont.