Congratulations Frances Roberts-Gregory and Christine Wilkinson, recipients of 2019 Switzer Fellowships! This year-long fellowship supports graduate students who aspire to improve the environment and demonstrate leadership in their field.
Each fellow receives $15,000 to advance their skills and develop their expertise to address critical environmental challenges as well as leadership training and access to additional professional development opportunities.
Roberts-Gregory’s work explores how black and indigenous women within Louisiana's river and bayou parishes navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries while fighting environmental racism and advocating for climate justice. She uses interdisciplinary and feminist methods to construct an ethnographic account of state-corporate crime in the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
For her dissertation research, Wilkinson is studying conflict between humans and carnivores in Kenya, using multidisciplinary methods such as GPS tracking of spotted hyenas and participatory mapping with communities. She said in a recent College of Natural Resources Student Spotlight interview, “As a person of color and a woman, I feel strongly about conducting research that can be applied in ways that benefit and empower disadvantaged and underrepresented groups which are so often left behind in decision-making processes around conservation and environmental sustainability.”