Leah K VanWey is Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology at Brown University, where she also serves as Dean of the School of Professional Studies. She holds affiliations with the Department of Sociology, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Population Studies and Training Center, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, and Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Previously, she served as Senior Deputy Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center, and Associate Provost for Academic Space. VanWey completed her education at the University of North Carolina, earning a BA (1996), MA (1999), and PhD (2001). Her research focuses on social demography and environmental social science, particularly examining household responses to reforestation programs in Brazil's Atlantic Forest and the social/environmental impacts of frontier settlement in the Amazon. Her research interests include agricultural intensification, land use change, migration patterns, population-environment interactions, household dynamics, intergenerational support systems, and remittance economies, with a geographic focus on Brazil. She employs interdisciplinary approaches, collaborating with anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and other social scientists. VanWey has secured significant research funding including grants from NSF, NIH, and NASA totaling over $2.5 million. Major projects include studying agricultural expansion in Brazil, climate variability impacts, land use change dynamics, and population-environment linkages. She mentors graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, including Trina Vithayathil. She teaches courses on human-environment interactions and research methods, including: Feeding Ten Billion, Methods for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research, Multivariate Statistical Methods, Fields and Methods of Social Research, and Professional Development seminars.
