Post-doc Focus: Anna Erwin

West Lafayette, IN—While images of fires, floods and drought fill the news, researchers across Purdue continue to work towards identifying potential solutions. Dr. Anna Erwin, a post-doctoral scholar in Purdue’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, will be supported in her work through a recently awarded USDA NIFA-AFRI postdoctoral fellowship through their Education and Workforce Development program. 

Erwin’s research focuses on understanding relationships between human perceptions and the social, political, and economic structures in which environmental problems are situated. Trained as an environmental social scientist, Erwin  has developed expertise in agriculture, adaptation to social-ecological change, environmental justice, NGOs, and collaborative methods. After her doctoral work with faith-based organizations that serve Latinx farmworkers in North Carolina, Erwin came to Purdue to conduct post-doctoral research in the Human Dimensions Lab on equitable adaptation to social-ecological change in the context of agriculture, water scarcity, and mining in Arequipa, Peru. Erwin will next turn to lead research with migrant and seasonal farmworker populations and farmworker-serving organizations in Indiana in light of the COVID-19 crisis, with a goal of improving current and future resiliency of agricultural communities.

Erwin joined Purdue in 2018 to join mentor Dr. Zhao Ma, Professor of Natural Resource Social Science and director of the Human Dimensions Lab to work as part of the Center for the Environment’s collaborative project with the Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa, the Arequipa Nexus Institute for Food, Energy, Water and the Environment. With counterparts from UNSA and Purdue, she conducted extensive fieldwork including gathering semi-structured interviews and co-creating surveys to study the relationship between mining, agriculture, climate change, and migration while implementing social science-focused workshops. 

In all her work, Erwin has particular interest in migration and how people perceive and adapt to social-ecological change. She also is consistently engaged with how social inequality shapes how people adapt in households, groups, and natural resource organizations, and also advocates for issues of environmental justice. More recently, Erwin, her mentor Dr. Zhao Ma, and a team of co-authors from both the USA and Peru published work such as “Outsourcing governance in Peru’s integrated water resources management,” “Creating a Collaborative Framework to Evaluate International University-led Water Research Projects,” and a first-author publication, “Intersectionality shapes adaptation to social-ecological change.”

Erwin will conduct her work on the new NIFA-AFRI grant as she prepares to begin her new appointment as an assistant professor at University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley in the department of in the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences (SEEMS). We wish Dr. Erwin the best and thank her for her efforts and excellence as a post-doctoral fellow in the Arequipa Nexus Institute and the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.