I am a PhD candidate in Sociology and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at UC Berkeley. My interests lie at the intersection of environmental social science, the sociology of labor, and political sociology. My research draws from geography and environmental and urban history to reconsider how classical social facts like labor relations, race, and urban development illuminate how we live on and remake the land.

My dissertation examines the environmental and labor politics surrounding the Port of Oakland, in historical political economic context. Seaports spatially condense the networked and competitive logic of global logistics, thus presenting rich opportunities for understanding the intersections of environmental, labor, and urban politics. Focusing on Oakland, I study how the physical and social landscape of the Bay Area has been remade by the hand of the competitive political economy of global logistics. As ports across the US embark on multifaceted decarbonization programs, my research seeks to crack open this ongoing energy transition to reveal the political dynamics of just transitions and climate justice.

I'm a graduate affiliate in the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative's Climate Cluster. I'm also a member of the Extractive University Project, a group of University of California sociologists studying the public university from the standpoint of the labor process and labor organizing of graduate student workers. You can learn more about this work, which has been published in Work and Occupations and Critical Sociology, at our website: extractive-uni.net

I have also studied the internal politics of labor unions and racial and class formation in labor. Prior to beginning my doctoral studies, I worked as a research coordinator at NYU’s Department of Population Health, where I managed two projects studying community-level chronic disease prevention and management.