Faculty

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a Visiting Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Political Science. He earned his MA and PhD in Political Science from Purdue University, West Lafayette, and a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico—Río Piedras. Dr. Tormos-Aponte specializes in social movements, identity politics, social policy, and transnational politics. His research focuses on how social movements cope with internal divisions and gain political influence. Tormos-Aponte’s work has appeared in Politics, Groups, and Identities, Environmental Policy and Governance, Public Administration Review, Alternautas, PS: Political Science and Politics and in the edited book The Legacy of Second-Wave Feminism in American Politics. He is currently working on projects on intersectional solidarity, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, transnational social movements, and activism in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Nueva Sociedad, Jacobin, In These Times, Undisciplined Environments, and Latino Rebels.

Dr. Sameer Shah recently completed his Ph.D. from the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability at The University of British Columbia. Trained as an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist in the EDGES Research Collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability), Sameer has expertise in environmental change, social vulnerability, and mixed-methods research. He uses political-ecological theory – and critical frameworks of social vulnerability and environmental justice – to connect social, political, and economic marginalization to the uneven distribution of environmental risk in society. His most recent research develops and applies critical, multi-methods and multi-scalar approaches to study equity and sustainability dimensions of livelihood water security in contexts of global socio-environmental change.