Academic focus: Rural livelihoods decision-making
Research summary: We do pro-poor, people-first environment and development research in areas like migration, agricultural development, irrigation and human-wildlife conflict. We focus on behavioral experiments and games to understand thinking and decision-making, and agent-based models to look at the consequences of those decisions at scale.
What do you like to do when you're not working?
I play a game with my children where I try to finish a sentence and they don’t let me.
What are your current outreach/extension projects?
I am developing workshops for graduate students around the world on creating games for research and learning, and using those to build out a curriculum on critical reasoning and the environment.
What are three adjectives people might use to describe you?
AirBnb hosts have described me as “good guest,” “punctual” and “stripped the beds, thanks!”
What (specifically) brought you to Cornell CALS?
I wanted to be in a place where people were thinking about all of the different dimensions of human-environment problems, and I don’t think there is anywhere better in the world for this than CALS.
What do you think is important for people to understand about your field?
Environmental stewardship is important as an outcome. Enabling people to choose to be good stewards is more important as a process. People are complicated and have layered motivations for choosing whether to do something. Finding ways to make progress in human environment problems requires tenacity, good listening and good communication; understanding the science is important, too, but the former are harder to support and maintain.
What's the most surprising/interesting thing you've discovered about Cornell and/or Ithaca so far?
That you can't be a Cornellian unless you can swim 75 yards.
If you had unlimited grant funding, what major problem in your field would you want to solve?
I would love to figure out how to democratize access to cooled spaces in hot climates. I think it’s most likely through solar photovoltaics, and I think it is among the most transformational things that we could do to put people on common footing across the world. We have known how to warm ourselves up, at scale, for 400,000 years, but we’ve only had air conditioning since 1902. The recent jump in approaches like solar irrigation farming that followed the plummeting in solar PV prices is really exciting as a stepping stone toward maintaining regular, appliance-level loads in hot, remote places.
If you could relate your work to one of the four transdisciplinary moonshots, which one would you most closely align with and why? They are: Redesigning 21st Century Agri-Food Systems; Accelerating Holistic Climate Solutions; Leading in Synthetic Biology; and Pioneering Life Science Breakthroughs.
I suppose it is probably somewhere between Agri-Food and Climate Solutions; if I have to pick one it’s Agri-food. While I appreciate that food production and environmental stewardship needs require us to put a focus on agri-food systems, our understanding of people and adaptation needs requires us to do a better job of identifying pathways out of agriculture.