Critical Ecology Lab Team
DR. Suzanne PierrePrinciple Investigator |
Suzanne Pierre (Sue; she/her) is a global change ecologist and biogeochemist focused on the elemental exchanges between plants, soils, microbes, and the abiotic environment. She is animated by the fact that biogeochemical processes have been altered by human pursuits of wealth and power, and understanding these connections can help us better understand and mitigate global ecological change and create a just world. She received an interdisciplinary BA in environmental studies from NYU and a PhD in ecology an biogeochemistry from Cornell Univeristy. Sue completed a UC President's Postodoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley and continues to work at UC Berkeley as a visiting researcher. She currently serves as the environmental scientist and educator at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco and lives on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone native territory (Oakland, CA).
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Kunal PalawatResearch Associate |
Kunal Palawat uses they/them pronouns and is a soil nerd who is deeply curious about exploring and deepening BIPOC relationships to Land, Sky, and Water. They love cooking, coding, the ocean, and seeing QT2SBIPOC experience uninhibited joy. Kunal is also a terrestrial biogeochemist currently working at the intersections of pollution, public health, and democratizing science at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the Ramírez-Andreotta Lab. To Kunal, Critical Ecology Lab is a research endeavor that integrates biogeochemistry and society and aims to do research in a radically relational, community-centered, socially just fashion.
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Amy Wang SahudProject Assistant |
Amy is a recent biology graduate from Oberlin College, and joined the Critical Ecology Lab this past Summer. She currently resides on occupied Cheyenne and Arapaho lands known as Denver, CO. She is assisting CEL in projects (like this digest!), and plans to continue studying ecology next fall through a masters degree. She’s a lover of cutting fruit, eating outside, walking slowly, poetry, and imagining and building our collective liberation. She is unabashedly grateful to grow here, and to (in one way or another) meet you.
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BOARD OF Advisors
Dr. Rebecca Ryals |
Becca is an Assistant Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Merced. She studies how nutrients and carbon cycle in agroecosystems, and how the management of these cycles contributes to the climate change mitigation and resiliency. Her research focuses on the capture, transformation, and beneficial reuse of organic wastes as resources to rebuild soil carbon and fertility and contribute to a more just food system. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, M.E.M. at Duke University, and a B.S. at Marywood University.
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Dr. Alexis Patterson WIlliamsDr. Stevie Ruiz |
Alexis Patterson Williams, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Patterson’s research lies at the intersection of equity studies, social psychology, and science education. Her work explores 1) equity issues that arise from social hierarchies when students work together on group projects in science and 2) teacher development of practices that support equitable and robust interactions between students that can deconstruct implicit and explicit language and literacy hierarchies. Her recent project has led to the development of an educational framework, (W)holistic Science Pedagogy, with her colleague and sister scholar, Dr. Salina Gray.
Stevie Ruiz is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. He received his PhD in Ethnic Studies from University of California, San Diego. Ruiz’s interdisciplinary research focuses on environmental justice, comparative race and ethnicity, critical science studies, and cultural geography. He is currently working on a book project titled “On Adversarial Grounds: The Racial Origins of Environmental Justice” (under contract with University of North Carolina Press).
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