Melissa Eitzel Solera, now with the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis has published a new journal article and was awarded a grant by UC Davis’ Global Affairs program to build on past work with The Muonde Trust. Melissa, along with Center Director Ryan Meyer, Pamela Reynolds from UC Davis DataLab and Sarah Mccullough from UC Davis’ Feminist Research Institute were honored at a reception hosted Global Affairs celebrating their award. Their project will support Muonde in examining how well they track the outcomes of their own projects, and will advance the pursuit of diversity/equity/inclusion in community-engaged projects in the Global South by investigating how UN Sustainable Development Goals serve (or don’t serve) the community in Mazvihwa Communal Area.
Melissa Eitzel Solera is a graduate of the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program at UC Berkeley (with dissertation work in Statistical Ecology) whose research goal is to improve the sustainability of Californian and global ecosystems using sophisticated data synthesis techniques that facilitate broad public engagement.
Working with Jenny Reardon (UC Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology and SJRC Director) and Ken Wilson (The Muonde Trust), Dr. Eitzel Solera led the NSF-funded project, “Understanding Resilience in a Complex Coupled Human-Natural System: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Information and Community-Based Action Research,” involving a 35-year collaborative research project in rural Zimbabwe run by The Muonde Trust. Together with the community research team, they developed methods of modeling the resilience of their system and synthesizing their long-term data to answer pressing concerns about sustainable environmental management. They also made theoretical and practical contributions to more just modeling practices in an age of “big data.” Refer to A modeler’s manifesto: Synthesizing modeling best practices with social science frameworks to support critical approaches to data science as published in Rio Journal in 2021 and Autoethnographic assessment of a manifesto for more trustworthy, relevant, and just models published in Environmental Modelling & Software on Science Direct in 2023.