In order of most recent affiliation
Dr. Cydney Seigerman
Cydney Seigerman graduated with a PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology in May 2024. Her dissertation is entitled "Fluid Inequities: The Dynamics of Water Relations and Water Insecurities in Ceará, Northeast Brazil". She is now working as a postdoctoral scholar on the Human Dimensions of Climate Smart Agricultural Practices project with Dr. Jennifer Jo Thompson in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at UGA. She is also continuing her work with colleagues in Ceará.
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Dr. Shelly Biesel
Shelly Biesel earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Georgia in May 2023. She is now working as a Mellon Fellow for the National Park Service on a fellowship entitled "Reintegrating Indigenous Ecological Knowledge into Northeast Waterway and Park Co-Stewardship Fellowship". Building on her ethnographic research skills developed as a graduate student, she will work with Tribal partners homelands are proximate to the National Parks of Boston and three Wild & Scenic Rivers in the northeast to help NPS move from engagement to co-stewardship with Indigenous communities.
Email: [email protected] |
Dr. Hayley Joyell Smith
Hayley Joyell earned a PhD from the Warnell School of Natural Resources at the University of Georgia in May 2023. She was co-adopted into the HECLab during her graduate studies and is now an honorary anthropologist! She does all things related to water and sanitation. You can check out all of her fascinating work here. Email: [email protected] |
Victor Felix
Victor Felix received his MSc in Geography in May 2023. Victor is a climatologist with a true concern for how his science can help inform better decision making and improve the lives of people, particularly in his natal Cariri, Ceará, Brazil. Victor is songwriter, musician and poet. You can purchase his book here (ships to the US). He is currently working at Laboratory for Population Dynamics at UGA
Email: [email protected] |
Dr. Andressa Vianna Mansur
Andressa spent two years with us a post-doctoral fellow working on the Network for Engineering with Nature project. She has now moved back to her second home in Spain, working for the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) on the BridgingVALUES project focused on terrestrial ecosystems. Email: [email protected] |
Dr. John Ryan McGreevy
John Ryan earned a PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology in 2022 from the University of Georgia. Since 2021 he has worked as the Socioeconomic Monitoring Coordinator in the Environmental Quality Division of the National Park Service (NPS). He currently is coordinating a new, long-term project aimed at improving understanding of visitors at all 400+ NPS Park Units. The focal areas include barriers to entry, increasing diversity of visitors, reducing visitor conflict, and improving communication of climate change to NPS visitors. Email: [email protected] |
Dr. Jon Hallemeier
Jon earned a PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology in 2021 from the University of Georgia. He has since relocated to NY City where he works as a ORISE Postdoctoral Researcher with the Engineer Research and Development Center of the US Army Corp of Engineers. He is continuing his focus on collaborative planning, involved in current design and management of Nature Based Systems for Jamaica Bay. Email: [email protected] or [email protected] |
Dr. Emily Horton
Emily obtained her PhD in Integrative Conservation and Anthropology in 2020 from the University of Georgia. Her PhD research focused on the socioecological dimensions of marine conservation and policy in a Brazilian marine reserve. She is currently a 2020 Knauss Marine Policy Fellow and serves as a Partnership Specialist with NOAA's National Sea Grant Office. In this role, Emily builds upon international collaborative experiences, including as a Fulbright scholar in Brazil and Peace Corps environmental educator and nonprofit photographer in Paraguay. Whether in her doctoral or partnership work, Emily enjoys engaging multiple stakeholders to address socioecological challenges in a collaborative, interdisciplinary, creative, and inclusive manner.
Email: [email protected]; Personal website |
Dr. Kristin VanderMolen
I graduated from the University of Georgia Department of Anthropology in 2015, and currently I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada. At DRI I work collaboratively with social and physical scientists to conduct basic and applied climate research in the Western United States. The research focuses on the development of climate tools and information to aid natural resource managers, farmers and other stakeholders in land-management decisions. With a strong emphasis on the usefulness of those tools and information for decision-making, the research is deliberately co-produced, responding directly to the needs of stakeholders and involving them throughout the research process.
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Dr. Brent Vickers |
I graduated with a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2015. Currently, I work for in the Questionnaire Design Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., which is a department within the National Center for Health Statistics , a division within the Center for Disease Control. The Questionnaire Design Research Laboratory (QDRL) conducts question evaluation studies in order to test and develop survey questions. QDRL staff design, conduct, and lead studies to isolate and define patterns of question interpretation, types of response error, and potential for bias in cross-national or cross-cultural populations. These evaluation studies inform survey managers and data users what constructs the survey questions are capturing, thus allowing them to better interpret survey estimates
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Dr. Michael Coughlan

Dr. Michael Coughlan is a a research associate at the University of Oregon, Institute for a Sustainable Environment. He is an ecological anthropologist who specializes in historical ecology, human-fire-landscape dynamics, and co-evolution of land use practices, social institutions, and landscape. Mike worked with us as a post-doc fellow for two years on the Calhoun Critical Zone project. He continues to contribute to the research from his home on the West Coast.
Dr. Ana Luiza Carvalho da Rocha
Prof. Ana Luiza is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade FEEVALE and a long time collaborator at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, where she is the project co-coordinator for the online Image and Visual Effects database. She specializes in visual anthropology and has won many awards for her ethnographic documentaries. She joined us at the HECLab for six months in 2018. Her sabbatical was dedicated to finishing her research project entitled "Ethnographies of environmental conflicts: Resilience and urban water management in the context of modern societies". We look forward to continuing our research collaborations and student exchanges. |
Dr. Cornélia Eckert
Prof. Eckert is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, where she specializes in visual, urban, and environmental anthropology and is the editor of Revista Eletrônica Iluminuras Revista Eletrônica Iluminuras. She is also the project co-coordinator for the online Image and Visual Effects database. She spent 6 months with us during 2018, working on her research project entitled "The City and Memories of Environmental Crises". Her visit marked another experience of the HECLAB/UFRGS anthropology partnership, which includes professor and student exchanges.
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Dr. Pedro Paulo de Miranda Araújo Soares
Dr. Soares received his Ph.D. from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and is currently a post-doc back in his hometown, at the Universidade Federal do Pará, in Applied Social Sciences. He spent a year with us as he was writing his dissertation "Environmental Memory in the Una Basin: An Anthropological Study of Urban Transformations and Public Politics of Sanitation in Belém. He specialized in the areas of Political Ecology and Urban Anthropology. |
Dr. Nayara dos Santos Egute
Michael Lonneman
Zachary Meyers

Zach is currently a junior at Georgia College and State University, majoring in Geography. While a senior at Clarke Central High School, he undertook a year-long internship at the lab through the Young Dawgs program. He worked closely with the research team on the Calhoun Critical Zone project, contributing to database development, data analysis and learned some GIS skills along the way.