About me

I am an environmental politics scholar and incoming assistant professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. I received my PhD from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. My research focuses on land and natural resource governance in the Global South. I combine causal inference methods, geospatial and remote sensing data, and qualitative interviews to advance knowledge in three areas: the distributive politics of environmental policy implementation; the social consequences of environmental degradation; and global conservation policy.

My research has been published in Science, One Earth, World Development, and Global Environmental Change, among others. My work has been funded by the NSF/APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the UCSB Chancellor’s Fellowship, and private foundations. I have served as a reviewer for various journals, including Journal of Public Economics, World Development, Environmental Research Letters, Forest Policy and Economics, and Journal of Development Studies.

Prior to my PhD, I worked as a social scientist at Conservation International. I received a Master of Science from the University of Michigan in 2017 and a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong in 2015. I speak Mandarin, Hakka, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I have conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, China, and Indonesia. 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.

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