I am an an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. My research examines the social tensions that arise from efforts to adapt to climate change. Through both ethnographic and computational methods, I analyze the political frictions that emerge as different social groups try and come to terms with present and future climate impacts. My work also evaluates how responses aimed at reducing human vulnerability can paradoxically increase precarity for certain communities. By highlighting unintended consequences of adaptation, my research contributes to theorizing and shaping ongoing processes of developing climate resilience.

In my book project, Making Climate Knowledge Actionable: The Politics of Protection on a Warming Planet (under contract with Columbia University Press) 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, river-basin 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, and was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Climate School as well as a Research Scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale in Paris. 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 also 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 Mello n 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, Nature Climate Action, Economy and Society, The Anthropocene Review, Big Data and Society, e-flux, 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.