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 an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Humanities. Her research interests are situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, and science studies in Colombia. Her book Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (2020) was published with Duke University Press, and she has been awarded a Fulbright (2020-2021) to work on the first transitional justice case that will consider “nature” a victim of armed conflict.
Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Pablo is a Mexico City native and a Ph.D. candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Pablo’s research is situated at the interface of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Environmental Anthropology, and Latin American studies. His doctoral research studies the emergence of the Yucatec Karst Aquifer System as an object of scientific and legal expertise in Mexico to consider its various political horizons. He was a fellow at the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities (PPEH) and a founding member of Penn’s EnviroLab. His research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology, the Penn Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Penn Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.
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.
Matt Barlow
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CASI, University of Pennsylvania
Matt Barlow is an environmental anthropologist with interests in feminist science & technology studies, environmental humanities, and critical geography. At CASI, Matt is working on his first book, tentatively titled Weather Waste, which focuses on how coastal South India's monsoonal environment continues to interrupt dominant approaches to waste management and infrastructural development in Kochi, India. He is also supporting Nikhil Anand on his Stories of Climate Action project.
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.
Nipun Kottage
MD-PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Nipun is interested in the politics of built environments as contested by technical experts (policy makers, engineers, resource managers), social movements, and agents of the state. Prior to joining Penn he was a student-project manager with Engineers Without Borders for water supply projects in Ghana and Nicaragua and studied the causes and consequences of gun violence in Washington, D.C.
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.
Carolina Angel Botero
Postdoctoral Fellow Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Carolina is a Colombian Lawyer and Anthropologist. Her work primarily focuses on the intersections between law, nature, and anthropology. She is currently looking into the Rights of Nature movement and is particularly interested in examining court cases in Latin America, as well as the implications these cases have for potential precedents for future environmental protection. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and an MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research.
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.
Lalitha Kamath
Fulbright-Nehru Fellow (Anthropology) and Visiting Scholar (CASI), University of Pennsylvania
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, planning and governance, and the environment. Her ethnographic research has looked at three kinds of political frontiers—peripheries and coasts in the Mumbai region, and urban state-making in Mizoram. Her current project is a comparative study of estuarine cities in the United States and South Asia in dialogue with US experts.
Sowmya Vaidyanathan
Masters Student, Environmental Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Sowmya studies multispecies relationships and environmental justice topics in and beyond South Asia. She is currently a masters student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences working on a thesis about human-wildlife conflict and land use patterns in the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve.