Samantha Wyman
Samantha Wyman is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During her graduate career, she is eager to explore how a community’s culture, politics, and relationship with nature inform citizens’ support for environmental policies. More specifically, Samantha intends to study the relationship between rural collective identity and opposition to local energy transition policies in fossil fuel-producing communities in the US.
Samantha graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2023 with her BA in Environmental Sociology. As an RA for the Sociology Department, she researched indigenous opposition to oil and gas pipelines in Latin America. Additionally, Samantha led the Vanderbilt Drinking Water Justice Lab’s digitization team as they created a geospatial database of Tennessee’s community water systems. During her final year at Vanderbilt, Samantha received high honors for her undergraduate thesis investigating the relationship between rural political estrangement and opposition to wolf reintroduction in Colorado agricultural communities.
The Salata Institute
The Salata Institute supports interdisciplinary research that leads to real-world action, including high-risk/high-reward projects by researchers already working in the climate area and new endeavors that make it easier for Harvard scholars, who have not worked on climate problems, to do so. Faculty interested in the Climate Research Clusters program should note an upcoming deadline for concepts on April 1, 2024.