Smart Forests contributors have experience in social, environmental and digital research and practice.
Principal Investigator
Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group. She has been Principal Investigator on the project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies, as well as the Citizen Sense and AirKit projects, which have all received funding from the ERC.
Research Assistant
Noel Chung is a Research Assistant on the Smart Forests project. She was formerly a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Informed by her time working on the design side of data analytics software, she is interested in how different groups of people make sense of, collaborate with, or reappropriate digital technologies.
PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk | Affiliated Researcher
Joycelyn Longdon is a PhD student on the Artificial Intelligence For Environmental Risk (AI4ER) MRes + PhD at Cambridge University. Her work explores the intersection of machine learning, forest ecology and Indigenous knowledge. She is also the founder of ClimateInColour, an education platform and community at the intersection of climate science and social justice making climate conversations more accessible and diverse.
Planetary Praxis Policy Analyst
Phoebe Hamilton Jones was a Policy Analyst working within the Planetary Praxis research group in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.
Project Administrator
Yvonne Martin-Portugues was the Project Administrator for the Smart Forests project.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Michelle Westerlaken was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University in Sweden. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer her work builds on posthumanism, feminist technoscience, critical animal studies, and decolonial theory to investigate possibilities for more sustainable contributions on a planet in a state of mass extinction.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Yuti Ariani Fatimah was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in science and technology studies from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands where she investigated the theoretical and practical aspects of power and agency in Indonesian biofuel projects. Yuti is an interdisciplinary scholar with training in mathematics, development studies, and innovation science, and experience with groups involved with topics ranging from smart cities to ecologies.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Trishant was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is a conservation geographer with a decade-long experience and interest in the socio-politics and geographies of wildlife conservation. His research focuses on the rising discourse of conservation militarisation, links between the illegal wildlife trade and armed conflicts, and conservation practice in violent environments.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Katy Lewis Hood was a Research Assistant and Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Their recently completed PhD thesis, undertaken in English and Geography at Queen Mary University of London, offers an interdisciplinary approach to Black and Indigenous poetic and spatial practices that respond to watery environments transformed by colonialism, slavery, and extractive capitalism in Turtle Island/North America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, and configure forms of socio-ecological relating otherwise.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Max Ritts was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge from 2021-22. He is an environmental geographer, having completed his PhD at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2018. His work operates at the intersection of political ecology, sound studies, and critical Indigenous studies.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dr Danilo Urzedo was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge from 2021-22. In 2022, he begins a researcher position with CSIRO in Australia. Originally hailing from Brazil, Danilo draws on multiple research perspectives from political ecology and environmental justice to investigate the interplay between tropical forest conservation and rural development. He is particularly concerned with understanding how emerging digital practices are transforming community participation to stop deforestation and upscale forest restoration actions in tropical regions.