Born and raised in Colorado, I am a proud alumna of Shining Mountain Waldorf High School. Growing up in a land-locked state, I was a teenager before I saw an ocean, but the “deprivation” only fueled my love for the marine world and I developed a passion for the ocean. I applied to college intent on becoming a marine biologist—writing my application essay about my admiration for Rachael Carson. But, I soon realized that the profound threats to the oceans I loved so much would be solved as much through politics and policy as through science, and I shifted my focus to environmental politics and policy. I earned my B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy and a citation in Arabic from Harvard College in 2008.
After college, I worked for Harvard’s Office for Sustainability on the University’s first Greenhouse Gas Reduction Commitment. In this role, I helped design the strategic process for transforming the university’s greenhouse gas reduction goal into tangible targets and actions across the university’s multiple schools and units.
In 2010, I moved to Egypt as a Fulbright Scholar to study sustainable land-use planning. I worked on a land-use plan for Egypt’s North Coast between Alexandria and Libya with the planning and urban development firm PUD.
I received my PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2018. My dissertation studied the barriers preventing the poorest farmers from realizing greater benefits from agricultural technology in South Asia. My research was funded through several awards and fellowships including the Switzer Fellowship Program, the Ray Goldberg Fellowship in Global Food Systems, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fredrik Sheldon Fellowship, and the Sustainability Science Program. During my time in graduate school, I worked with international organizations and local NGOs to support inclusive development projects including the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal and PRAN, a small NGO in Bihar, India. I was also the agriculture sector lead for the project on Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development.
I am currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard Kennedy School and a lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard College. My current research focuses on the role of inequality and maldistributions of power in shaping nature-society development pathways in coal country Appalachia.