Manuela Quijano Hoyos is a second-year M.S. student in the lab, she has a graduate specialization in Environmental and Ecological Economics from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico and graduated with a B.S. in Ecology from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. Her research interests are the intersection of conflict, peacebuilding and the environment, common pool resources management, and people’s motivation in Payments of Ecosystem Services. She has experience in research in Colombia and Mexico. She will additionally complete a graduate minor in Gender Relations in International Development (GRID) to understand how gender approaches can influence environmental problems.
Zahrria Johnson is a first-year M.S. student in the lab. She received her B.S. in Biology with a focus in Ecology from the University of Houston in 2022. She is interested in research exploring environmental (in)justice, community resilience, geospatial data science, and the relationship between socioeconomic demographics in (sub)urban areas and patterns of environmental quality and risk. Through her graduate research in East St. Louis, Illinois, Zahrria looks to use mapping tools and methods to analyze how environmental justice communities are identified and represented geovisually.