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Caroline Acheatel is a joint degree master's student in the School of Architecture and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Working at the intersection of these two programs, she studies how an area’s ecological context can guide the design process as well as overarching, urban-scale issues associated with landscape conservation and development. Through the generosity of the Tropical Resources Institute and the mentorship of architect Tatiana Bilbao, Caroline's research focuses on the political ecology of Mexico City, with a specific eye towards how designers can work within this context to enact meaningful urban-scale change. Working collaboratively with research partner Jacqueline Hall, her research examines historic and contemporary linkages between water management and urban morphology in Mexico City. She uses architectural and ethnographic research methods to synthesize underrepresented narratives from multiple geographic areas and temporal moments in Mexico City, as a way to offer innovative solutions for its urban environmental future.

Consuelo Amat is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University and a United States Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar. She studies state repression, civil society development, and nonviolent and armed resistance, with a focus on Latin America. Consuelo's dissertation, the Emergence and Consolidation of Opposition to Authoritarian Rule, examines how opposition to autocratic regimes develops in the face of state repression, specifically during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989). The United States Institute of Peace, the John F. Enders Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies have supported her research. Previously, Consuelo was a Research Assistant at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program, studying and publishing on security in Latin America, and worked at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, tracking ongoing popular struggles. She graduated with B.A. degrees in International Affairs and Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University’s Government Department.

Natalia Ariza is a second-year MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management. She began her career with ExxonMobil’s Refining & Supply, where she worked as a global supply chain analyst, and a reliability engineer at a plant. Parallel to her work experience, Natalia has been heavily involved in the advancement of U.S. Latinos in STEM through her lifetime membership affiliation with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. Moreover, in the past two summers, she worked with Agruppa, a World Bank sponsored agribusiness start-up in Colombia, and the poverty reduction team at the United Nations Development Program – Mexico. On campus, Natalia serves on the executive board of the Association of Hispanics and Latin American Students, and is a proud recipient of the Forté fellowship. She plans to expand her economic development interest in Latin America through the organization of the first ever Latin America Business Conference at the School of Management. Natalia graduated Magna Cum Laude as an industrial engineer at Florida State University. She is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, and grew up in Miami, FL. She enjoys playing soccer, learning German, and cultural exchange trips to her home country.

Zaib un Nisa Aziz is a second year doctoral student in global history. Her research interests lie in anti-colonial thought and practice during the first half of the twentieth century. She looks at international revolutionary networks featuring an eclectic group of campaigners, artists and intellectuals primarily emanating from the global south including South Asia and Latin America who active in cities in Europe. Zaib is interested in how various emancipatory projects during this period intersected with each other as well as how their practioners and propagators interacted with the state(s) in which they operated.

Olivia Sanchez Badini is pursuing a joint Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. She is originally from Mexico City and holds a Bachelor of Science in natural resources conservation from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Prior to coming to Yale, she did research on enabling environments for small and medium forest enterprises in the context of REDD+ forest financing schemes in developing countries. She also participated in civil society involvement at the United Nations Forum on Forests, and was active with the International Forestry Students’ Association. At Yale, Olivia is focusing on impact investing and conservation finance. She has interned at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Korea and Alter Eco Foods (a B Corp focused on fair trade and organic chocolate), and consulted for VegInvest (a venture capital fund focused on disrupting the animal agriculture space). In the latter, she worked on a market study to identify investment opportunities in the emerging plant-based sector in Mexico.

Patrick Barker is a second-year PhD student in history. His research focuses on slavery, community formation, race, and un-free labor in the Southern Caribbean and North-east South America after the Haitian Revolution. He has related interests in the history of capitalism, political economy, and race relations in Atlantic World. He received his BA (Honours) in Politics and Modern History from the University of Manchester and an MA in Atlantic History from Florida International University. He also currently serves as co-coordinator for Yale's Center for Historical Enquiry in the Social Sciences.

Emily Briggs is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences who is broadly interested in the ecology, evolution, and behavior of Neotropical primates. Her research examines how human activities such as deforestation and agricultural encroachment impact the distribution of wild primate species in the Gran Chaco of South America. She is particularly interested in examining the impacts of land-use change on owl monkey (Aotuz azarae) populations in northern Argentina and Paraguay.

Katherine (Katie) Brown is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She received her B.A. in Hispanic Studies with a minor in French & Francophone Studies from the College of William & Mary in 2013. Her dissertation project examines the transformation of architectural topoi in Miguel de Cervantes’ late works as a means of articulating new concepts of self, place, and literary form in early modern Spain. In addition to her research on literary and cultural production in the Spanish Golden Age, Katie is interested in colonial Latin American literature, transatlantic literary and cultural studies, and representations of early modern literatures and cultures in present-day constructions of national identities in the Hispanic world. Her articles on the Libro de buen amor, Cervantes, and Borges have appeared in journals such as the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, eHumanista, and Cervantes.

Andrés Bustamante is a first-year Ph.D. student in Latin American History. His research focuses on the history of archaeology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. His work examines the role of archaeology as a tool of state formation and its intersections with resource extraction industries. More broadly, his interests include museum studies, indigenous history, nationalism, and the politics of knowledge. Andrés received a B.A. in History from Yale College in 2015 and M.Phils in Archaeology (2016) and History of Art (2017) from the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he is a graduate affiliate at Berkeley College and a co-coordinator of the CLAIS Latin American History Series.

Anna Maria Cárcamo is an MEM Candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, focusing in International Environmental Policy, Communications and Environmental Justice. She comes from Brazil, where she graduated in Law, and researched and worked in Environmental Law. Here at Yale, she has a special interest in studying Environmental Governance and Environmental Justice in the Latin American region. She is in favor of the strengthening of our region, as a collective voice, and for this reason, she is also one of the leaders of the Latin America Student Interest Group and a Co-chair of the Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean Conference.

Christina M. Carolus is a Ph.D student and anthropological archaeologist with interests in human-environmental interaction, paleoecology, paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological methods, foodways, identity, and cultural heritage issues. She holds a degree in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Christina’s field and laboratory work has been oriented primarily toward questions of human-environmental interaction and of the nature of plant remain data as potential indices of past social relations, social practices, and worldviews. Her previous research employed multiscalar analysis of plant remains to investigate dimensions of local environmental change, social and economic relationships, and landscape management at the Classic period Maya regional center of La Milpa, Belize. Most recently she has excavated and employed paleoethnobotanical regimes at the Classic period Maya site of Piedras Negras (Guatemala), several sites in the Northern Maya Lowlands of Yucatán (Mexico), and at early and mid-Holocene cave sites in the Southern Andes (Argentina). Beyond the laboratory and the field, she seeks to engage with and incorporate indigenous epistemologies and concerns, social theory (classical social, contemporary critical, gender, postcolonial), and various strands of philosophy. An important element of her practice as an archaeologist concerns critical engagement with the nature and role of archaeological research in contemporary Latin America; more broadly, it extends to questions of social, political, and economic impacts upon Latin American communities at various scales. This includes interests in heritage issues (e.g. tourism industries, archaeological links to globalization and development, museum ethics, identity formation, and the politics of site ownership, conservation, and protection) and confrontation of potential neocolonial aspects of archaeological practice.

Carlye Chaney is a doctoral student studying biological anthropology under the guidance of Claudia Valeggia. She is broadly interested in using human reproductive ecology to study the interaction between biology and culture. Specifically, she wants to investigate the various ways that social change impacts indigenous health in Latin America.

Andra Chastain is a historian of modern Latin America with a focus on twentieth-century Chile, urban history, the transnational Cold War, and the history of science and technology. Her dissertation is titled "Vehicle of Progress: The Santiago Metro, Technopolitics, and State Formation in Chile, 1965-1989."

Oscar Crespo Pinillos is a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Originally from Logroño, in Spain, before coming to Yale he worked in Spain in the forest sector. Passionate about nature and the outdoors from a young age he decided to study forestry engineering in Spain at the University of Valladolid and University of Santiago de Compostela as well as abroad in Finland and the US through exchange programs. He started his professional career as environmental consultant. He also interned at the Biodiversity Foundation, a public foundation in Spain, dealing with their Land Trust platform and biodiversity conservation projects. Later he worked in sustainable forest management and in a forest products company. At Yale his main interest include conservation finance, community forestry and rural development both in Spain and Latin America.

Liana DeMarco is a PhD candidate in the History of Science and History of Medicine program at Yale. She specializes in the history of medicine, the history of race, and environmental history in the Americas from the eighteenth century to the present. Her work traces embodied experiences of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and environmental change while also demonstrating how norms of health, race, and labor have changed over time. Using tools from biopolitical theory, critical race theory, and environmental humanities, she seeks to bring together narratives of racialized health, exploitation, and destruction in plantocratic societies. Her dissertation examines the relationship between medicine and racial capitalism in Cuba and Louisiana (ca. 1763-1860), arguing that ideas of race made their way into Cuban and American medical traditions via business culture. Other current and future projects include a history of cruise ships and extraterrestrial colonization, a history of military health services in the United States, and a history of medicine in the nineteenth century “coolie” trade.

Ross Donihue is a cartographer and graphic designer that specializes in map-based storytelling. His research interests focus on information design and geospatial analysis. His work is focused in North America and Latin America. His projects in Latin America have included: science communication on volcanoes in Guatemala, conservation mapping in Costa Rica, renewable energy policy in Chile, and wildlands conservation in Patagonia. He started Maps for Good in 2012 with the mission to create maps and digital media for conservation frontiers in the US and abroad. Ross is currently pursuing a Masters degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Melaina Dyck is a Master of Environmental Science (MESc) candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES). Her MESc research focuses on non-timber forest product (NTFP) cultivation among indigenous communities in the Peruvian state of Ucayali. She is conducting this work under a Memorandum of Understanding between F&ES, COSHIKOX (El Consejo de los Shipibo-Konibo y Xetebo), and la Universidad Nacional Intercultural de la Amazonía. Previously, Melaina has spent time living and studying in Nicaragua and Chile, and she is participating in a field course on conservation biology in Panamá in January 2018.

Nicholas Fields is a first-year Master of Environmental Management (MEM) Student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Foreign Fulbright Scholar hailing from Barbados. Prior to starting the MEM program, he worked for nine years in the environmental not-for-profit space, initially in areas of advocacy, community engagement and learning, and facilitating public-private sector partnerships for marine environment conservation; and subsequently in climate vulnerability and resilience in Small Island States. At the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Nick hopes to achieve a few objectives: to build his foundations in energy and the environment, particularly in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation; to become more competent in advanced climate resilience and sustainability discourse and practice; and to improve his quantitative analysis skillsets. His career goal is one that encompasses work in climate, the natural environment and geospatial analysis, especially related to issues of climate vulnerability, adaptation and resilience of nature, people and places.

Jacqueline Georgis is a third-year doctoral student of ethnomusicology within the Department of Music. Her work explores ideas of cultural hybridity and transnational exchange within the Lusophone-Atlantic. She is particularly interested in researching these themes through the lens of a contemporary Afro-Portuguese-inspired electronic dance music genre from Lisbon, Portugal, asking how this and other EDMs challenge and re-imagine neo-colonial sociocultural and political configurations of the Lusophone world. Before coming to Yale, Jacqueline received her B.M. in cello performance from the School of Music, Ithaca College (2013), and continued cello performance study under the tutelage of Geneviève Teulieres-Sommer at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, Alfred Cortot (2013-2015) in Paris, France.

Hannah Greenwald is a second-year PhD student in the History department. Her research focuses on indigenous communities in southern Argentina and Chile during the nineteenth century. More broadly, she is interested in themes of settler colonialism, state formation, borderlands studies, and spatial history. She received her BA in History from Amherst College in 2014. Before coming to Yale, Hannah spent two years teaching English in Cáceres, Spain.

Javier González is a first year Student at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His professional studies span from participatory decision-making processes in natural resource management all the way to capacity building at the local level, as well as ecological restoration and agroforestry systems. Prior to coming to Yale, Javier worked for 4 years in a conservation NGO dealing with forest conservation, climate change mitigation and carbon offsets. That experience convinced him that conservation is compatible with development only if people is brought into the picture, and long-term commitments by different stakeholders are adopted. He majored in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and has specialization courses in Environmental economics, public policy and ecological urban design.

Maria Esther Guevara is an Ecuadorian passionate about the interaction and dependency between the social and biological sciences. Prior to coming to F&ES, she was involved in the writing of several books that explored domestic and international matters. Maria worked as research assistant for four different projects that ranged from the historical background of Ecuador to current environmental issues to the international implication of social minorities. Moreover, she worked with two former Ecuadorian presidents in social projects. Maria interned at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington D.C. with the forest team. During her time working there, she completed three projects regarding FSC certification and good forest practices in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Maria is now at her second year of the Master in Environmental Management. She will be graduating soon and she aims to generate feasible conservation strategies that intersect with responsible natural resources management and supply chain.

Jacqueline Hall is jointly pursuing a Master of Architecture and a Master of Environmental Management. She completed her BA at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in Urban Political Ecology and Architecture. Her research focuses on environmental justice in water management in Mexico City from a design and political ecology perspective.

Chris Hebdon is a fifth year student in the combined doctoral program in Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies, focused on renewable energy politics in the Andes and Amazon of Ecuador.

Carlos Hernández is a Ph.D. student in Latin American History who specializes in modern Mexico. His dissertation project traces the emergence of beach tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula, particularly in Cancún. A proud Fox Fellow, he will be partnering with El Colegio de México in Mexico City while he completes his dissertation research. Prior to his time at Yale, Carlos earned his B.A. in Political Science and English with a minor in Hispanic Studies from Texas A&M University and his M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of Florida, where he also taught courses on Latin American and United States history. In addition to his interest in contemporary history, Carlos is writing an article on the relationship between race and nation in nineteenth-century Mexican historiography. Outside of his scholarship, he has served as a writing fellow for the Graduate Writing Lab and as a graduate assistant for La Casa Cultural, Yale’s Latinx cultural center.

Corey Herrmann is a PhD student in Yale's Department of Anthropology, with an interest in the archaeology of Ecuador. He has previously participated in archaeological fieldwork in Guerrero, Mexico and two projects in Cuzco, Peru. His Master's thesis focused on a ceramic analysis of previously excavated material from the Jama Valley, in northern Manabí, Ecuador, pertaining to the culture known as Chorrera, from the Late Formative Period (ca. 1300-300 BCE). His current research focuses on continuing work in northern and central Manabí, with an eye toward communities (ancient and modern), how they are organized, and the means by which they manage(d) and live(d) with volcanism, earthquakes, and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) flooding events.

Jason Hong is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of French. He graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2016 with a BA in French and Francophone Studies; he has also spent time studying and living in Lyon and Montreal. He is interested in reading Francophone literature from a global perspective. He has worked extensively in the past on comparatizing Francophone Caribbean literature, examining transnational dialogues between the Caribbean and other Francophone regions (the Indian Ocean and Quebec in particular).

Camilo Huneeus is a Chilean industrial engineer pursuing a Master of Environmental Management at Yale. From a system dynamics perspective, he is interested in both water management and disaster risk reduction. At Yale he worked in Huaicos (Flashflooding) resilience public policy with the regional Government of Ica in Peru and in transboundary flood resilience in India and Nepal. Currently he is exploring the link between Artificial Intelligence and Water Management. Prior to coming to Yale, Camilo worked as a Wastewater treatment engineer and as an advisor on Social Economy to the Chilean Ministry of Economics.

Ana Lambert’s research focuses on issues surrounding the importance of freshwater estuaries, their vulnerability in the face of climate change, and the international responses associated with migratory bird protocols. She is most interested in understanding how policies are developed considering the many competing social interests that are prevalent in multi-functional landscapes. Ana holds a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Instituto Tecnologico y Estudios Superiores del Occidente (ITESO), Mexico. She has extensive academic and working experience in Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Australia that spans the disciplines of social science, engineering, and wildlife conservation.

Chris Lewis is a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He studies international development, climate change, and agriculture. He is particularly interested in Latin American agroecological systems and ecological footprints. He has worked as a journalist in Cuba, Honduras, Peru and Bolivia. Prior to coming to Yale, he also worked as a community development professional, communications consultant, and Spanish teacher.

Paulina Luna is originally from Mexico and her family moved to the Chicago area when she was young. Growing up with a mixture of Mexican and American culture allowed Paulina to develop a love for languages and new cultures. This fascination led her to major in French at the University of Notre Dame, where she also studied Pre-Health. After graduation, Paulina combined her passion for medicine and cultures by pursuing a Master of Science in Global Health back at the University of Notre Dame. Paulina has experience working in France, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Peru. She is currently a first year student at Yale School of Medicine and hopes to continue working in global health, focusing in reducing health inequalities among vulnerable communities in Latin America and immigrant populations in the U.S.

Jacqueline Ly is a first-year Ph.D.student in Latin American History. Her research concentrates on the Bay of Honduras in the eighteenth-century to explore how British loggers, their allies, and their foes shaped the British and Spanish Empires from the periphery. She is particularly interested in centering the Mexican Caribbean as a region of study and an important interlocutor between Atlantic World and Caribbean histories. Prior to attending Yale, Jacqueline received a B.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and a M.A./M.Sc. from the dual-degree program at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

Diego Manya is a Master’s of Environmental Management Candidate 2018 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is interested in integrating environmental, social and economic data to inform public policy, with particular emphasis in monitoring and evaluation. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Environmental Engineering from the UNALM in Peru, and has worked in the private sector and on a UNDP-UNEP project in Peru. His interest in Latin America revolves around the increasing urbanization, and the role that evidence-based public policy can play in increasing sustainability in urban settings.

Maria Inês Marques is a DFA candidate in Dramaturgy at Yale School of Drama. Her dissertation project focuses on scenic representations of miraculous and devilish interventions in early modern evangelizing theater in Latin America. She holds a BA degree in Languages, Literature and Culture (Portuguese/English), and an MA in English and American Studies from the Faculty of Arts, University of Porto. Her dramaturgy credits include La Scène, by Valère Novarina (TeCA, Portugal); The Moors, by Jen Silverman (Yale Repertory Theatre); Bulgaria! Revolt!, by Miranda Rose Hall and Elizabeth Dinkova and Neva, by Guillermo Calderón (Brown University/Trinity Rep). She has worked as managing editor for Theater (Yale University and Duke University Press) and as script reader for the Yale Repertory Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience. Maria was the translator and dramaturg of the English language world premiere of Boris Yeltsin, by Mickaël de Oliveira (Yale Cabaret; 2018 remount in NYC). She collaborates, as visiting dramaturg and translator, with the Portuguese theater company Saudade (NYC), for which she translated The Constitution, also by Mickaël de Oliveira (2017, Theater Under St. Marks, NYC).

Manus McCaffery graduated from Stanford with a focus on energy and environmental policy. Afterwards, he spent three years working with the Mongolian Foreign Minister on regional energy and environmental policies. His focus was on how to sustainably mine uranium and increase international security and cooperation in the nuclear sector. Following the Fukushima disaster, he spent two years working in environmental risk management for USAID. He traveled frequently to the DR Congo, where he coordinated the risk management component of a $90 million Food for Peace project. He also traveled to Honduras, Malawi, Haiti, El Salvador, and Paraguay to lead environmental compliance workshops for the US government. He was subsequently named a UNESCO Global Youth Ambassador for Sustainable Development and awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to complete an MPhil at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, Manus has worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society tracking deforestation in Central American rainforests as well as the Ukrainian Parliament on natural gas geopolitics. He is a citizen of Ecuador and the United States.

Chris Melvin is a first-year PhD student in Latin American History. His current research interests focus on resource frontiers, tropical forests, and conflicts over development and community autonomy during the twentieth century. More generally, his interests include environmental history, agrarian studies, and indigenous history. Originally from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Chris completed a BA in History at Dalhousie University and an MA in Latin American History at McGill University.

Camilo Monge is pursuing an MBA from the Yale School of Management and he is interested in infrastructure around clean energy, conservation and water. His most recent work focused on public infrastructure project management in Peru and P3 projects. Camilo has experience in both the public and private sector. Camilo holds a BS in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP).

Julia Monk is a Ph.D. student in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on the role of predator-prey interactions in driving ecosystem processes. She is currently studying how pumas, condors, and vicuñas influence nutrient cycling and productivity in the high Andean deserts of northwestern Argentina. An Argentine-American herself, Julia is grateful that her fieldwork allows her to restock her yerba mate supply and catch up on fútbol.

Santiago Muñoz Arbelaez is a PhD candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. His work focuses on Indians and empires in the early modern Atlantic world and is informed by scholarship on comparative borderlands, agrarian history, and the history of books, prints, and maps. His most recent publication is Costumbres en disputa. Los muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI(Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2015), which received honorable mention in Colombia’s National History Award. Santiago am also the cofounder of Neogranadina, a non-profit that digitizes historical archives and promotes digital humanities in Colombia.

Blair A. R. Nelsen is a first-year Master of Arts in Religion candidate at Yale Divinity School, concentrating in Latinx/Latin American Christianity. She was born in Houston and raised in Venezuela. She earned her BA with Honors in Environmental Studies from Brown University in 2006, writing her thesis on community-based conservation practices among traditional ribeirinho communities in the Brazilian Amazon. She has lived in Brazil for the last eleven years, and is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish. Her research interests center around new religious movements and ecology in Latin America, particularly Brazil.

Eli Rau is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. He studies political economy and comparative politics, with a focus on Latin American democracies. He is especially interested in modeling parties’ electoral strategies and voter turnout. He is currently studying partisan identification and turnout in Chile, intra-party competition in open-list proportional representation systems, and party brands.

Ben Rifkin is a second-year Master’s student of Forest Science at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. His master’s research brought him to the tropical dry forests of Southern Madagascar where he is studying the impact of human disturbance on diversity and regeneration of tropical forests. Before, Ben earned his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and International & Global Studies from Brandeis University. He then contributed to a variety of research projects with the US Forest Service in Southeastern Alaska, Northern California, and with the Harvard Forest near Boston.

Monica Nunez Salas is a 2018 Masters of Environmental Management candidate with a focus on Policy Analysis and Evaluation. Her interest is on China - Latin America cooperation, and has worked with the Peruvian Government on capacity building and performance evaluation of environmental authorities at the local, regional and national levels; as well as acting as Environmental Law counsel for projects in the energy, infrastructure and agricultural sectors, among others. Monica has extensive experience in the mining sector, most recently collaborating with WWF Beijing on the implementation of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce’s (CCCMC) Guidelines for Social Responsibility in Outbound Mining Investments. She holds a Law Degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and is Fulbright Scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Aminah Sallam is the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant, was born in Houston, and moved to New York City at the age of fourteen. Growing up as an Arab American Muslim, Aminah became acutely aware of the struggles facing minorities and immigrant populations, especially within our current healthcare model. Her work at Albert Einstein Medical College in the genetic basis for variability in disease phenotype for DiGeorge Syndrome ultimately won her third place internationally as part of Intel’s Science and Engineering Competition. Aminah continued to study genetics at the University of Chicago, where she realized that most medical models for disease are based solely off a Caucasian biological model, and thus could not account for the complications seen in patients of color with the same illnesses. She began to study the origins of breast cancer in African Women, researching often overlooked populations in Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, Cameroon and Uganda. Her work found that current diagnostic technology can be adapted to improve diagnostic and therapeutic measures in breast cancer patients of color in resource poor settings. Aminah is currently a first year medical student at Yale, where she hopes to leverage her experiences to advocate for female minority populations often overlooked or ignored by our current medical model.

Radha Sarkar is a PhD student in the Political Science Department. Before coming to Yale, she completed an undergraduate degree in politics at Princeton University with a minor in Latin American Studies and a master’s in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include the study of political violence, and the politics of ethnicity and religion. She is particularly keen to understand the ways in which we might explore and compare these themes across South Asia and Latin America.

Emily Sessions is a fifth year in the History of Art department where she studies the art of the Caribbean in the long nineteenth century. She is especially interested in connections between the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean; the visual cultures of botany, cartography, and scientific illustration; and issues of power and identity embedded in representations of the landscape and in the worked land itself. Emily earned her MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, where she focused on modern and contemporary Latin American art. Before arriving at Yale, she worked at the Brooklyn Museum and at Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York.

Emily Sigman is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow pursuing a Master of Forestry and Master of Global Affairs joint degree. Emily studies forestry, farming, and ranching practices from around the world, and through her research aims to blend those practices in ways that foster regenerative relationships between people and landscapes. Through her work, she seeks to navigate our interconnected world and illuminate pathways for the mutual flourishing of earth's many communities. Emily has worked broadly in Latin America over the last ten years on sustainability-related projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

Emily Snyder is a fourth year PhD Candidate in Latin American History, and her research focuses on the relationship between Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1980s. Her dissertation excavates the cultural, political, educational, and religious exchanges that transpired between these two countries, seeking to understand how each revolution – Cuban and Sandinista – impacted the other. Emily’s work intersects both the local and transnational, tracing “internationalist” movement between two revolutions while emphasizing grassroots experience of the Cold War. She graduated from the University of Florida in 2013 with a BA in History and is a devoted runner, ice cream eater, and dog lover. Her work can be found in Cuban Studies.

Maile Speakman studies questions of circulation, digital culture, intellectual history, and race and empire in the Americas. Her dissertation project examines an alternative media network in Cuba called "el paquete semanal" and considers how telecommunications infrastructure and U.S. imperialism shape the politics of internet access in Cuba. Before pursuing a PhD in American Studies at Yale, Maile received an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. Her M.A. thesis, “Performance Cubano: Reading Queer Theory in Havana,” used ethnographic methods to document how Cuban intellectuals circulated U.S. queer theory in the early 2000s. In 2007, Maile studied at Havana's Universidad de las Artes (ISA) as an exchange student and from 2011-2013 she worked as a language instructor for the Ministry of Education of Spain. Currently, Maile co-coordinates Yale's Latin American Studies Working Group and is the editorial assistant for the journal Social Text.

Monique Flores Ulysses is a Mexican/Cypriot second year doctoral student in the Department of History. Monique is a cultural historian of 20th c Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Indigenous peoples as related to American Empire and overlapping colonialisms. Specifically, she is interested in the role American Empire has played in shaping the popular cultures of México and the United States in relation to music, fashion, and physical culture; la frontera/the border between México and the United States; the ways in which Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Indigenous peoples navigate their relationships to México and the United States as colonial nation states; and divergent understandings of race in relation to marginalized femininities and masculinities on both sides of la frontera. She is also interested in how dystopian imaginaries and American ideas of México intersect. Monique is indebted to, and her work is guided by, anti-racist, intersectional, and decolonizing feminisms.

Camila Velez Valencia is interested in the European novel and its counterlives in other parts of the world, such as India, South Africa and South America. She, herself, is from Colombia and comes to the Yale Department of Comparative Literature with a B.A. in English and Economics from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Columbia. She is currently working on a digital platform to promote latin american literature, which can be found at www.mitosmag.com

Leandro Vigna was born and raised in a small rural town called Justiniano Posse, in Argentina. He holds a degree in Architecture from the National University of Cordoba, where he focused on green buildings. Prior to his arrival at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Leandro spent almost two years working for an architectural office based in Cordoba, Argentina. During most of his time, he served as an In-house consultant, coordinating several projects from our clients’ offices in Seattle, Washington, and in Denver, Colorado. In addition, he was the green building appointee of the office, and as such, he created the “Green Initiatives” program, and gave lectures to prepare other colleagues for the “Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design” (LEED) Green Associate exam. Here at F&ES, Leandro is focusing his studies and research on green building certification systems, more specifically in the policy frameworks that lay behind them. His idea is to learn more about the policy foundations of these systems, and how to better adapt current existing green building rating systems to developing countries. For his internship next summer, Leandro am planning on working for the South African Green Building Council. South Africa is one of the best examples of a developing country that has successfully developed its own certification system, and he wants to learn from the experience of the professionals that worked in that process.

Brandi M. Waters is a doctoral candidate in the joint program in Latin American History and African American Studies. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Latin American History from Johns Hopkins University. Her research explores the intersections of slavery, medical practice, and the law in the late colonial period in Latin America, with specific interests in the role of disability and health status in legal claims in areas of Colombia, Brazil, and the United States. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, CLAIS, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Jacob A. Welch is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology. He conducts archaeological research in Yucatán, México, along an ancient causeway system connecting the ruins and modern towns of Ucí and Cansahcab. His dissertation project studies the construction two monumental residences (I.e., palaces) at Ucí and Ucanha, and how their building histories relate to changing (1) building practices, (2) labor organization, and (3) socio-political organization. His project specifically studies how the construction of the two elite residences, as a product of non-elite laboring bodies, offers one approach to study the relationships between elites, non-elites, and the personal ties that bind them.

Michelle E. Young is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University in the department of Anthropology. She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2009 with a double major in the History of Art and Anthropology and a minor in Spanish. She has conducted archaeological field and lab work in the United States, Belize, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Madagascar and has held internships at the Museo Larco in Lima, Peru, and at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Her dissertation project aims to understand the relationship between long-distance interaction and the emergence of new forms of social behavior in Peru during the early first millennium BC at the site of Atalla, located in the remote highlands of Huancavelica. Since 2014, she has directed the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Atalla, carrying out mapping, survey, excavation, sample collection, and laboratory analysis of materials at Atalla in collaboration with Peruvian and international students and scholars and local workers. Her project also established a multi-year program of community outreach and education in the small agrarian community of Atalla. Her research has been supported by generous funding from Yale University including CLAIS, Tinker-Field, MacMillan, Josef Albers, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and external funding from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Rust Family Foundation.

Ben Zukowski works with Andean bear and tapir conservation, ecotourism, education, and sustainable development in several rural villages of the northern Ecuadorian Andes. He has published multiple journal articles on human wildlife conflict, sociology studies, and best practices in the region. He is still in-touch with the community leaders and biologists to advise on capacity building. He also remains close with friends and families after living and working in the region. Previously, Ben studied international development, ecotourism, and ecology at the Institute of Central American Development Studies in San Jose, Costa Rica, including field work and a thesis on the cultural sustainability of the Bribri tribe in the lowland Caribbean rainforest. He received his BA from the University of Michigan in 2013 and also spent three years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he was a member of the Multilingual Communities of Practice. Ben will receive his Masters of Environmental Management Degree in 2019 from Yale University and is currently a Science Communication Fellow for the Yale Institute of Biospheric Sciences. He hopes to work a lot more with Ecuador/Latin America during his time at and after Yale!