About me

I am an environmental social scientist and doctoral candidate at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. I study rural land governance in the Global South using a combination of political science theory, causal inference methods, and geospatial tools. My current projects investigate the unequal health impacts of gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon, and how state capacity and patronage affect forest law enforcement in Bolivia. My research has been supported by the NSF/APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, among others.

Prior to UCSB, I worked as a social scientist at Conservation International, where I studied the diversity and dynamics of global area-based conservation governance systems.

My research has been published in Science, World Development, and Global Environmental Change, among others. I have served as a reviewer for various journals including Journal of Public Economics, World Development, Forest Policy and Economics, Journal of Development Studies, and Global Ecology and Conservation.

I received a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong in 2015 and a Master of Science in conservation ecology and environmental informatics from the University of Michigan in 2017. I speak Mandarin, Hakka, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I have conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Indonesia, and the US. I spend most of my free time wandering in nature looking for wildlife or dancing to Latin music.

You can find my latest CV here.

To get in touch, please email yifan_he@bren.ucsb.edu.

Google Scholar | LinkedIn | ResearchGate | ORCID | Github | Twitter