Post-doctoral and Graduate Fellows

Brianna Castro
PSE Post-Doctoral Fellow
Brianna Castro recently completed her PhD at Harvard University in the Department of
Sociology. Her research interests include the social dimensions of climate change adaptation,
environmental migration, climate change mobilities, and the interplay between individuals and
institutions in climate governance. She is working on the project, “Addressing Climate in Our
Nation’s Service Corps” as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland.
Her dissertation, “Shifting Sands – Adapting to Climate Change in Everyday Life,” explored
climate change adaptation as a social process grounded in ethnographic and interview data
from three climate stressed areas: rural Colombia, coastal North Carolina, and the informal
settlements in the megacity of Lagos. It considered how people adapt to changing climate
conditions and how institutional contexts impact daily climate-related decisions in these vastly
different environments.
Brianna has been in the Social Consequences of Climate Change working group at the Institute
for Public Knowledge, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the First Street Foundation’s
Flood Lab. She is committed to publicly impactful, engaged scholarship and has collaborated on
research with partners such as The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, and the MIT Center for
Energy and the Environment. Before her doctoral studies, Bri served in the US Peace Corps, was
a program associate for the community development nonprofit MDC Inc., and worked
extensively with immigrant and migrant communities in North Carolina through research, the
public-school system, and non-profit organizations.

Sohana Nasrin
PSE Graduate Fellow
Sohana Nasrin is a doctoral candidate at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Her research interests are alternative media, social movements, climate change and visuals. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on the journalism and activism of the youth climate movements in the United States that received momentum in 2019.