Feb. 6, 2012

Out of 10 Michigan Society Postdoctoral Fellows selected university wide this year, two—Kimberley Kinder and Elizabeth Pringle—are affiliated with the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Each is finishing their first of three years as an assistant professor and using funding from the Fellows program to pursue research projects.

Kinder came to U-M to investigate environmental and social justice issues in Detroit. Her research explores how people use residential spaces to keep their costs of living low and their communities stable.

"I consider a wide range of activities, from do-it-yourself home repairs and home-based business ventures to community-led rehabs and neighborhood watches," Kinder said. "In analyzing these issues, I hope to show how residents creatively use domestic landscapes to combat financial disinvestment, environmental hazards, and political marginalization."

Her first project was to finish a book on water politics and social activism in Amsterdam covering the period from 1990 and 2010. The National Science Foundation funded the research, completed last year. This year, she begins ethnographic fieldwork in Detroit.

A political geographer by training, Kinder earned a bachelor of arts (2004) in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University; a master's (2005) in urban planning from Carnegie Mellon; a second master's degree (2006) in nature, society and environmental policy from Oxford University; and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley (2011).  Her Fellow appointment is joint between SNRE and the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Pringle is studying nutrient exchange in a three-species mutualism among Cordia alliodora trees, symbiotic ants, and hemiptera, or í¢â‚¬Å“true bugs,í¢â‚¬  which are known for their beak-like mandibles that allow them to access sap.

"I will be investigating whether plants can control the tastiness of their phloem for sap-feeding aphids and scale insects," Pringle said. She will then look at whether changes in phloem are reflected in hemipteran honeydew composition and whether that in turn affects ant behavior. It's a complex "symbioses within symbioses."

Her research has taken her to the tropical forests spotting the Pacific coast of Mexico and Central America. One project, led by Duke University professor John Terborgh, investigates how the hunting of seed dispersesí¢â‚¬”fruit-eating primates, birds, and ground mammals that, by virtue of their diets, expose and transport seedsí¢â‚¬”is affecting tropical floodplain forests in the Peruvian Amazon. This summer, Pringle plans to spend time on campus working on greenhouse experiments before returning to her field sites in Jalisco and Oaxaca, Mexico, and at the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica.

She has an A.B. from Harvard University (2004) and a doctorate from Stanford University (2011). She also is jointly appointed with SNRE and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology within the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

The Michigan Society of Fellows was established in 1970 and is funded with endowment grants from the Ford Foundation and the Horace H. and Mary Rackham Funds. In 2007, the Mellon Foundation awarded a grant for four additional fellows in the humanities. The Society of Fellows is an interdisciplinary intellectual community that connects scholars from diverse fields. This yearí¢â‚¬â„¢s cohort includes fellows in astronomy, mathematics, complex systems, anthropology, English language and literature, and Afroamerican and African studies.

Related links:

Pringle's website at U-M: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~epringle/Research.html