Yifan (Flora) He is an environmental social scientist and doctoral student at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies rural land governance in the Global South using a combination of political science theory, causal inference methods, and geospatial tools. Current projects include the relationship between rural out-migration and land governance in South America, and the social and environmental impacts of collective tenure regimes in Brazil.

Prior to UCSB, she worked as a social scientist at Conservation International. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong in 2015 and a Master of Science in conservation ecology and environmental informatics from the University of Michigan in 2017.

Grants, Awards and Distinctions:
Schmidt Family Foundation Research Accelerator Award. $8,000.

James D. Kline Fund for International Studies. $5,000.

Michael J. Connell Memorial Fund Research Award. 2022-2024. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. Assessing socioeconomic and environmental impacts of land use restrictions in Indigenous lands in Brazil. PI. $15,000.

Environmental Justice Research Fund. 2022. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. $1,000.

Individualized Professional Skills Grant. 2022.  University of California, Santa Barbara. $1,000.

Katie McMahon is an MA/PhD student in the Geography Department with research interests at the intersection of climate & environmental change, social vulnerability, human health, and food & water security. Katie holds a BA in Geography and Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her PhD advisor is Kathy Baylis. Katie's current work uses integrated climate and demographic data sources to explore the impacts of contemporary climate change on food security outcomes in South Asia. She is particularly interested in disentangling the multiple mechanisms through which climate shocks influence health, as well as identifying social determinants of nutritional vulnerability to climate change.

Nicole Thompson González is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary primatologist in the Department of Anthropology. Her work draws from evolutionary biology, animal behavior, sociology, and public health to examine the multiple links between sociality, health, and biological fitness in human and non-human primates. Her work on wild primates in East Africa provides models of the social and developmental drivers of health inequalities from the individual to the population level, by pairing long-term behavioral and ecological data with biomarkers of health status. Further, her work centers life history theory as a framework to evaluate the costs and benefits of social relationships and community dynamics throughout the life course. She currently manages the Biobehavioral Health Laboratory at UCSB, performing and overseeing several assay techniques. Her current research focuses on immune regulation as a powerful pathway by which individuals embody social experience.