Center adds five new team members for Spring 2023

February 3, 2023

The R.H. Mallory Center for Community Geography is excited to announce five additions to our team for Spring 2023, Alexandra Mirabal, Charley Allen, Cheryn Vigil, Elizabeth Chou and Taressa Nield.

Alexandra Mirabal grew up in New Mexico and is completing two bachelor's degrees, one in Geography and Environmental Studies and one in Astrophysics. She is joining our team as an ASSURE Fellow through the UNM College of Arts & Sciences. Arts & Sciences Support for Undergraduate Research Experience (ASSURE) is designed to foster faculty-student research collaborations. Alexandra is also a certified dance instructor and loves to spend time outdoors. She will be working on the Center's project of Mapping for Community Empowerment in the South Valley. 

Our Center is grateful to work with another ASSURE Fellow, Cheryn Vigil. Cheryn is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying Geography and Environmental Studies. She is proud to come from the mountains of the Mescalero Apache homelands and has an interest in studying wildfires. She will be working on the Community-Engaged Research for Wildfire Recovery in Mora, New Mexico with the Center attending community meetings, conducting interviews and focus groups, reviewing maps and other documents, and analyzing community risk and recovery. Outside of studying wildfires, she enjoys practicing visual art such as painting, graffiti and printmaking.

Charley Allen is a senior undergraduate student in Geography and Environmental Studies with an emphasis in GIScience and a minor in Sustainability Studies. They have an associate's degree in Envrionmental Planning and Design from Central New Mexico Community College and have lived in New Mexico for five years. They are originally from Florida and decided to move to Albuquerque after traveling the country doing agricultural work. They have been invovled in organic and small-scale regenerative agricultural practices for eight years and currently grow in a closed-loop family farm in the South Valley. Charley's academic interests include sustainable and adaptive development and land management, food waste and reclamation infrastructure, and socioeconomic implications of climate change in rural agricultural regions of South America and beyond. They will be working on a mapping project with the City of Albuquerque for the Center.

Elizabeth Chou is a third-year undergraduate student in Environmental Science and a minor in Sustainability Studies. She grew up near Chicago and is interested in human-environment relationships. She will be working with the City of Albuquerque Sustainability Office for her internship with Sustainability Studies and the Center. She will assess the potential for food waste recovery around the city with a focus on the grocery sector. She is also involved in UNMLEAF and is the vice president of the UNM Geology and Environmental Science Club as well as the secretary of the UNM Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society.

Taressa Nield is a fourth-year undergraduate student in Geography and Environmental Studies with a concentration in GIS and remote sensing. Her research interests include satellite imagery analysis, geospatial intelligence, sociodemographic mapping, human and environment relationships, and climate change monitoring. For the Center, she will be working on Mapping for Community Empowerment in the South Valley as part of her honors thesis. Taressa plans to continue her education into graduate school for geospatial intelligence and geospatial data sciences. Taressa also works as an intern for the Earth Data Analysis Center on UNM's campus and has previously interned for NASA doing climate change monitoring and community outreach. Outside of campus she enjoys viticulture, running, rock climbing, and The Sopranos.

We are grateful and excited to add such wonderful new members to our team this semester!