Neema Kudva Faculty Lead of the NFLC, is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University. Kudva’s research focuses on community-based planning and international urbanization, particularly issues related to the growth and governance of small cities and their regions. She is interested in institutional structures and organizational practices for equitable planning and development at the local level paying particular attention to the role of NGOs and the other civil society actors as it plays out in various arenas including water and waste, livelihoods, informality, and sustainable development. She has published widely, including two co-edited volumes, Rethinking Informalization (2005, with Lourdes Beneria) and Cities of the Global South Reader (2015, with Faranak Miraftab). She is a Fellow of the Atkinson Center for Sustainable Future, and a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of the South Asia Program, as well as the Office of Global Learning, both at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell. At NFLC, Kudva directs curriculum and research on how urbanization impacts biodiversity and wellness, particularly through the lens of waste and water management and small town urbanization. Email: kudva@cornell.edu

Steven Wolf, is Associate Professor of Natural Resources. His main research interests are in environmental governance and political economy of land resources. He specializes in institutional analysis of conservation in agricultural and forested landscapes and the ways in which socioeconomic and ecological claims relate to one another. Current projects include critical analysis of payments for ecosystem service schemes in agrienvironmental policy in the USA and China, strategies to reduce inorganic nitrogen fertilizer usage in order to advance water quality and climate change mitigation, and establishment of working forests that aim to balance livelihood and ecosystem service goals. At NFLC, Wolf directs curriculum and research projects on understanding and mapping governance systems in the areas where we will work. Email: saw44@cornell.edu

Andrew Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. His previous research focused on various forms of Tamil displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia and South India. He has recently finished a book manuscript on the subject of Tamil plantation communities facing the uncertainties of retrenchment and relocation in Malaysia, entitled, Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations. More recently, he has started research on clinical neurology and psychiatry in North America and South Asia. His recent publications include Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 2009), co-edited with Eric Tagliacozzo, and Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, co-edited with Kenneth George (Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2005). At NFLC, Willford leads curriculum and research projects that explore, ethnographically, the impact of biodiversity loss on traditional health and healing systems. Email: acw24@cornell.edu                                                                                     

Lucinda Ramberg is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.  She took degrees at Bryn Mawr College (AB), Union Theological Seminary (MA) and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). Her research projects in South India have roots in longstanding engagements with the politics of sexuality, gender and religion.  Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press 2014) focuses on sacred prostitution and its reform in Karnataka.  It was awarded four prizes.  Her current book project turns to the revival of Buddhism in South India and questions of religious conversion in relation to projects of social transformation, caste radicalism, and sexual politics. At NFLC, Ramberg leads curriculum and research projects that explore biodiversity in relation to gender, medicine and thresholds of life—birth and death. Email:ler35@cornell.edu