Melanie Ford

Project focus: The Fellow will develop and empirically evaluate real-world strategies for public engagement with science that meaningfully connects communities across different ideological or value-based fault lines. 

Melanie Ford is a cultural anthropologist with training in qualitative research and culturally sensitive education, analysis, and storytelling. As an anthropologist, she has interviewed and worked between journalists, scientists, researchers, government officials, legal professionals, and community leaders to study, translate, and communicate in careful detail the complex and challenging relationships between people and their surroundings. Melanie holds a Ph.D. from Rice University, where she studied the urban politics of land use in post-conflict Guatemala and highlighted local struggles for housing rights and ecological restoration. Her work was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and recognized with Rice University’s Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship for outstanding achievement and promise. Melanie has taught undergraduate-level courses in anthropology, history, Latin American and Chicana/o studies, science and technology studies, and urban planning at ArtCenter College of Design, Rice University, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).