I am currently an Associate Professor of political and environmental philosophy at Durham University in the UK.

I also serve as the Faculty Director of Sustainability in the Arts & Humanities at Durham University as well as the Co-Director of the University’s Centre for Environment and Humanities. Additional, I am a member of the California Global Biodiversity Alliance (CalGBA) and serve as their Research & Academia sub-group lead.

Prior to joining Durham University, I was a Researcher at the Climate Futures Initiative in Science, Values, and Policy at Princeton University in the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the University Center for Human Values. Before that, I was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University in the Mahindra Humanities Center as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research cohort on Migration. I earned my PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2018 and my MA from San Francisco State University in 2012.

My areas of specialty are in environmental politics and governance, political and environmental philosophy, and applied ethics. While grounded in applied political philosophical reasoning, my research is interdisciplinary in scope. I engage with policy and legal theorizing, as well as international relations, environmental studies, human geography, and gender studies. In my work I focus on justice-based concerns and the uneven impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on (both human and non-human) communities. I examine the dynamics of governance institutions and interlocking systems of structural inequality, and I develop evaluative frameworks for assessing and driving institutional change to better address pressing environmental and social challenges. I also work at the policy-research interface and continue to develop opportunities to connect academic research and policy/decision-making in both my research and organizing work.

A primary focus of my current research is on the normative and political governance challenges of “climate mobilities” including voluntary and forced immobility and migration, in-situ adaptation, external and internal displacement, refugee flows, managed retreat, and planned relocation due to climate variability, slow, and rapid-onset climate events. In addition to climate mobilities governance, my work address other challenges in global environmental governance including governing the interconnections of biodiversity and climate change, climate intervention technologies/geoengineering, and the political economy of ecological crises .

I am currently Secretary Officer for the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) and a current member of the Steering Committee for Philosophers for Sustainability. I am on the Editorial Board for the journal Ethics, Policy, and the Environment and I also serve on the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Environmental Ethics.