Welcome! I am a human geographer, political ecologist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Utah in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability, as well as faculty in Environmental Humanities and Asian Studies. I was a 2023-24 Wilson China Fellow, and a 2023-25 Public Intellectual Program (PIP) Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

I write broadly on resource politics, global China, and geopolitics. My expertise is centered on China, and my interest in borderlands motivated research and work across Southeast, Central, and South Asia. It is informed by several years in the NGO and education sectors in Tibet and China, where I began working in 2008. My research has been published in Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, Ecology and Society, Geopolitics, Area, Ambio, Extractive Industries and Society, Globalizations, and in multiple books; she is the co-editor of The Rise of the Infrastructure State (Bristol University Press 2022). 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.

I am on the editorial board of The People’s Map of Global China & Global China Pulse journal, both within Global China Lab. I am also the co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory and a New Books Network podcast host. I was elected At-Large Councilor (2024-26) for the Cultural & Political Ecology (CAPE) specialty group of the American Association of Geographers. 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, 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). I earned my Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and my masters in Development Studies at the University of California Berkeley.

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.