What inspired you to undertake a PhD?

“So, my main goal is I want to be a professor. I really like teaching. I’m not sure yet if I want to be a research professor or just a teaching professor, but I think I’d be interested in teaching research methods.”

What does your PhD focus on?

“I study prescribed fires. It’s basically setting a little eco region, or an area on fire, and it can be for a variety of reasons such as ecological management or risk reduction. You can only do prescribed fires under very specific weather conditions, so I’m looking at how climate change is going to affect the weather conditions under which you can do burnings.”

What drew you to ARIES?

“I’m an associate, and I think my motivation behind going for that was because it was an interdisciplinary project. I did my undergrad in chemistry and then I found that wasn’t applied enough – it was too fundamental. I wanted something more impactful, so I did my master’s in environmental engineering. But I found it still seemed removed from impact. With my PhD, I like being in the Environmental Sciences because I feel like being in this school is inherently more interdisciplinary. My project has an aspect of looking at data, but I also get to interview people, and that was a huge part of me wanting to do this. I didn’t think I was ever going to find a project like this, but I saw it and thought, “oh, this seems like a really unique opportunity.” The fact that I get to engage with people who actually do prescribed fires is huge for me, because that’ll set me up to learn how to engage with people who actually put the science into practice.”

How has your background and identity influenced your approach to research and your scientific journey?

“Since undergrad, I’ve constantly been thinking about teaching practices that I want to keep as a professor, and practices I want to get rid of. Prescribed burning is inherently indigenous – indigenous peoples across the world, literally everywhere, invented it. In terms of the Western perspective, it’s ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’ What you’re talking about when you say ‘measure’ seems to be from a Western perspective, using numbers and metrics – current scientific academia, which is highly skewed towards the Global North. Indigenous peoples did not need that to manage the landscape for thousands of years before the settlers came. I think the idea that you need to be able to measure something to manage it is a very colonial perspective; that perspective has been used to dispossess indigenous peoples, in the past and currently, as well.”

What career aspirations do you currently have?

“I’d love to be able to teach interdisciplinary methods of research and rethink the way we do science. Currently, I think it’s very Western-focused. I feel like there’s this huge divide between scientists in their ivory tower and everyone else, and it really shouldn’t be that way. I’d like to have an opportunity to have a teaching platform, to encourage people to rethink how we do science.”