Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in Geography, Environment, and Asian Studies at the University of Utah, a 2023-24 Wilson China Fellow, and a 2023-25 Public Intellectual Program (PIP) Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Prior, I was the Chevalier Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Transportation and Development in China at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. I earned my Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and completed my masters in Development Studies at the University of California Berkeley. I was previously a Global China Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center (2019), a Research Fellow at the University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment in Laos (2018-20), a USAID Research and Innovations Fellow in India (2015), and a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow in Dalian, China (2009-10).

My expertise is centered on China, and my interest in borderlands has motivated research across Southeast, Central, and South Asia. My research focuses on infrastructure, issues at the environment-society nexus, and China’s global integration. I use multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-lingual methods to conduct immersive and socially engaged research. I am committed to long-term fieldwork and rely on ethnography to connect meticulous, ground-level cases with global processes. My research is informed by several years in the NGO and education sectors in Tibet and China, where I first started working in 2008.

I am on the editorial board of The People’s Map of Global China & Global China Pulse journal and am the co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory and co-host of The Roundtable podcast.

I relish in movement and am an avid outdoors person, whether backpacking in the Himalayas, canyoneering in Utah, ski touring with my two huskies, or cycling (and eating) my way around Taiwan.