Poushali Bhattacharjee (Geography)
Nikita Das (Anthropology)
Nikita Das is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, UB since 2019. She holds a Masters in Energy Economics from University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India in 2014. At UB, she was awarded a Climate Change Fellowship for the years 2019 through 2021. In the past she worked on policy- and governance-related issues in the Indian electricity space, with a special focus on renewables. Based on ethnographic work in farming communities in West Bengal, her dissertation research explores the imaginings of electricity as a nation-building tool, and how they reconcile with the construction of just and democratic low-carbon futures.
Elias Plata Espino (Anthropology)
Elías Plata Espino has been a graduate student in the Anthropology PhD program at UB since 2019. He pursued a master in Human Ecology at CINVESTAV-Merida, Mexico (2017) and has published articles on his research on human-animal relations in journals such as Tropical Conservation Science and Journal of Ethnobiology. At UB, he was awarded with the Climate Change Fellowship (2019-2021). His current research explores the historical dialectic between extraction and space of refuge – both for indigenous and mestizo populations – that lays behind forest use in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico.
Anupriya Pandey (Sociology)
Anupriya Pandey is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at University at Buffalo. She is a qualitative researcher interested in environmental sociology, theory and political economy. She is curious about the intersections of caste, environmentalism and colonialism in India. For this inquiry she is specifically drawn towards studying unequal food systems and their association with environmental casteism.
Surabhi Pant (Sociology)
Surabhi Pant is a qualitative researcher interested in understanding changes in land use and gender relationships resulting from development discourses in India. Her dissertation aims at exploring the relationship between broader structural forces like neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism, and rural women’s connection with their land and biophysical environment in the Northern Himalayan region of India. In addition to these academic pursuits, she has worked at the grassroots level on issues concerning rural development and sustainability in India.
Caitlyn Sears (she/her; Geography)
Caitlyn (MA, International Trade) is a Buffalo native and PhD candidate in the Geography Department at the University at Buffalo. She is a broadly trained economic geographer with interests in development, chemical geographies and mixed methods. Her current research focuses on the political economy of agrochemicals in Southeast Asia, with a specific interest in Malaysia. She will add to discussions in geography on shifts in agrochemical production and use, as well as contemporary agrochemical trade in developing and middle-income countries. Caitlyn has published in the Professional Geographer and presented her work at various international conferences. In addition to her dissertation research, Caitlyn teaches a variety of geography courses in Singapore at the Singapore Institute of Management- University at Buffalo campus. She formerly ran a study abroad program in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China.
Hannah Stokes-Ramos (she/her; Geography)
Hannah is interested in agro-food systems and agrarian transitions, political ecology, political economy, social and environmental justice, food security and food sovereignty, climate change resilience, underdevelopment, postcolonialism, Caribbean studies, public participatory processes in planning, power-knowledge, complex adaptive systems, relational ontologies, disaster capitalism, green grabbing.