I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Climate School. I study the different ways that communities, organizations, and governments are adapting to climate change. I am particularly interested in political dynamics that emerge as experts in different economic and administrative domains bring knowledge about future climate risks into present day decision-making, and how subsequent policies and practices shape the social distribution of climate impacts.

In my current book project, Making Climate Knowledge Actionable: Adaptation and the Politics of Protection on a Warming Planet I analyze the interaction of expert credibility, economic imperatives, regulatory capacity, and social contestation, in the construction of adaptive practices in four different institutional arenas, including catastrophe insurance, public water management, coastal protection, and international agricultural development. In each case, the construction of "actionable knowledge" — i.e. the specific articulations of climate science with existing socio-technical systems of decision-making — strongly shapes how future costs of climate change are defined and thus who will likely bear their burden.

I received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (2021) and was previously a Research Scholar at the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale (2021-2023). During my dissertation, I was a visiting doctoral fellow in the Anthropocene Formations group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2019-2021), and prior to that a researcher at Science Po’s médialab (2012-2015). I hold a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (2012). My work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the French Institute for Research and Innovation in Society, and the French National Research Agency and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Economy and Society, The Anthropocene Review, Big Data and Society, and the Revue Française de Socio-Économie.

In a previous life, I worked at the environmental finance organization Ceres, and before that, as an environment and science reporter and independent producer for various National Public Radio shows and affiliate stations, including Living on Earth, Marketplace, Weekend America, WBUR, WCAI, and the audio project This I Believe.