New Faculty

Federico Andrade Rivas Joins the Geography Department as Assistant Professor

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:54:51 +0000

Federico Andrade Rivas Joins the Geography Department as Assistant Professor Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/08/2025 - 13:54

My path to becoming an Assistant Professor at the Geography department started in Colombia, where I studied environmental engineering and anthropology. After working in a malaria surveillance and climate change adaptation project with nomadic Indigenous populations in the Amazon, I realized that my passion was to understand the complex determinants of human health disparities. Thus, I decided to pursue a Master of Public Health at the University of Cape Town, excited to learn from “South-South” collaborations on chemical contamination issues. The drive to understand human health as deeply intertwined with the natural environment led me to join emergent approaches to human health, such as planetary health, and to pursue a PhD at the University of British Columbia. In Canada, I had the privilege to collaborate in “North-South” partnerships on pollution and globalized food systems, as well as work in solidarity with First Nations and Inuit on the nutritional benefits and contamination issues of traditional food systems.

Currently, my scholarship sits at the intersection of human well-being and the integrity of ecosystems that support life on Earth. I focus on applying a creative combination of geospatial, quantitative, and qualitative research methods to assess contamination issues at global, national, and local scales. I do this while elucidating connections between pollution threats to other planetary health challenges and drivers of health disparities, such as environmental change. I strive to conduct relevant and meaningful research that is genuinely interdisciplinary, collaborative, and focused on solutions and communities’ aspirations beyond solely evaluating damage.

When I am not conducting research or teaching, you can find me rock climbing, brewing coffee, or sharing time with my family.

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Ellen Considine Joining the Department of Geography and CIRES

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:52:11 +0000

Ellen Considine Joining the Department of Geography and CIRES Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/08/2025 - 13:52

In August 2025, Ellen Considine started as an Assistant Professor of Geography and a Fellow of CIRES (the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences). She is also a faculty affiliate of the new Public Health program at CU ��ý��.

Ellen’s research focuses on the application of innovative data science methods to address environmental health challenges, both to evaluate the status quo and to design data-driven monitoring and intervention strategies to promote public health and equity. Recent examples of her work include investigating the air quality impacts of nation-level plastic waste policies (via the mechanism of open burning) using a combination of remotely sensed data and causal inference methods, and developing a framework with which reinforcement learning (a branch of AI) can be used to optimize issuance of heat alerts for public health.

She received her PhD in Biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, as an undergraduate at CU ��ý�� (BS in applied math, minors in geography and economics), Ellen worked in Earth Lab, mentored by Colleen Reid. In October 2025, Ellen was welcomed back to Earth Lab and gave a research talk – recording available.

In both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026, Ellen is teaching GEOG 3023: Statistics & Geographic Data.

CIRES also published an article, welcoming Ellen to our faculty!

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Sisimac Duchicela Joins Geography as a New Assisant Professor

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:37:25 +0000

Sisimac Duchicela Joins Geography as a New Assisant Professor Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/09/2024 - 14:37

Sisimac Duchicela

Growing up, Sisimac traveled and lived in many different countries in Latin America and the US, but always came back to the indigenous community where her family is from in the highlands of Ecuador. Here is where her interest in mountain ecosystems began, and then later, it solidified during her undergraduate studies in Ecuador. Sisimac obtained her master’s from the University of Michigan’s School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and then earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. During and after her Ph.D. (as an NSF PRFB), Sisimac worked on creating and maintaining long term climate change experiments in Andean highland ecosystems (i.e., páramo and puna).

In general, Sisimac’s research is focused on high elevation landscapes where understanding ecosystems processes is complex because of the interaction between climate, ecology, and human dynamics. To study these processes, she uses experiments and monitoring, observational studies, functional traits approaches, qualitative data collection and processing, and advanced statistics and modeling. Furthermore, she has worked and aims to continue working closely with Andean indigenous and farming communities to design and monitor ecological restoration programs, implement climate change simulation experiments, and propose adaptation strategies.

For fun, Sisimac loves to go on runs or do yoga, read sci-fi or fantasy books, and play with her energetic border collie, Maki.

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Katherine Siegel Joins CU as a New Assistant Professor of Geography and Fellow of CIRES

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:31:11 +0000

Katherine Siegel Joins CU as a New Assistant Professor of Geography and Fellow of CIRES Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/09/2024 - 14:31

Dr. Katherine Siegel is an assistant professor in Geography and a Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, where she is also affiliated with the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab. She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist interested in the sustainable and equitable management of ecosystems in the context of rapid environmental change. With a focus on working landscapes, she integrates diverse quantitative and qualitative data to understand the drivers of change in complex social-ecological systems and collaborates closely with land management agencies. Much of her current work focuses on the socio-environmental impacts of changing wildfire regimes in western North America, and she has ongoing work on deforestation in protected areas in the Amazon Basin. She is also active in work that advances causal inference methods for environmental and ecological applications.

In the spring, she will teach Geographic Information Science: Spatial Analytics (GEOG 4103/5103) and Earth Data Analytics (GEOG 4563/5563).

California's Sierra Nevada that burned in the Rainbow Fire in 1992.

Example of a working landscape, in Richmond, California.

Katherine hiking the John Muir Trail

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Isaac Rivera Joins Geography as a New Assistant Professor

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:22:41 +0000

Isaac Rivera Joins Geography as a New Assistant Professor Gabriela Rocha Sales Mon, 12/09/2024 - 14:22

Isaac Rivera

My research program is collaborative, community oriented, and interdisciplinary. My research and teaching spans several intersecting fields in human geography, including digital geographies, Latinx & Indigenous geographies, the geohumanities, urban settler colonialism, and environmental justice. My research investigates the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Colorado and how Denver’s Indigenous communities refuse otherwise. I am currently working on a book project titled, Insurgent Cartographies & The Undoing of Settler Imaginaries. In addition to my book project, I am also exploring questions on matters of pedagogy in Latinx geographies, including the tensions, contradictions, and responsibilities of enacting Latinx geographies on Indigenous lands. As a Xicanx geographer, teacher, and organizer, I strive to be a good relative, colleague, and community member across the Latinx diaspora and beyond.

My latest paper, (Re)Mapping Native Denver & The Making of Native Assembled Counter-Cartographies is forthcoming in the journal, Geohumanities.

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