My research brings together the sociology of knowledge, organizational studies, and environmental sociology to examine the social tensions that arise from efforts to adapt to climate change. Leveraging ethnography, interviews, and computational methods, I analyze the interactions between state institutions, scientific experts, market actors, and local stakeholders, shedding light on the political frictions that determine who gets to participate in, and benefit from, adaptation efforts. My work also evaluates how responses aimed at reducing human vulnerability can paradoxically increase precarity for certain communities. By highlighting these unintended consequences, my research contributes to theorizing and shaping ongoing processes of climate adaptation.

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.

Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia’s Climate School, 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 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 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, 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.