About the IndigeLab Network

(Michif/Red River Metis and settler, they/them) Dr. Max Liboiron is a Professor in Geography at Memorial University, where they direct the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). CLEAR develops feminist and  anti-colonial methodologies to study marine plastic pollution. Liboiron is author of Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-author of Discard Studies: Systems, Wasting, and Power (MIT Press, 2022).

Lab: Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)

(Ahtna, a citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah in Alaska, and of Sicilian descent, she/her)

Dr. Carroll directs the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, co-founded the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, and co-founded and chairs the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the Indigenous Data Working Group at the IEEE, and the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group at the Research Data Alliance. At the University of Arizona (UA), she is Associate Professor, Public Health and American Indian Studies Graduate Program; Assistant Research Professor, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and its Native Nations Institute; and Affiliate Faculty in the College of Law. Stephanie’s interdisciplinary research group the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance develops research, policy, and practice innovations for Indigenous Data Sovereignty.

Lab: Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance

(Inupiaq, she/her)

Dr. Kat Milligan-McClellan is an Inupiaq, runner, mother, microbiologist, and beader, not necessarily in that order. Raised in the remote community of Kotzebue Alaska above the Arctic Circle that is 80% Alaskan Native, she uses an Alaskan fish, stickleback, to study host-microbe interactions to determine the extent that the host environment contributes to host-microbe interactions and how ecotoxicants affect the development of fish. She also studies how to improve STEM education, with a focus on historically excluded and underrepresented students.

Lab: Kat Milligan-McClellan Lab

(Red River Métis, they/them)

M Murphy is a Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where they hold a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice at the University of Toronto. Their research is concerned with feminist and anti-colonial approaches to environmental justice, data, and reproduction, as well as have a focus on Indigenous science and technology studies. They are Co-Director of the?Technoscience Research Unit,?which hosts an Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab. They are lead social science PI in a large CFREF project working with chemists and automated substance discovery, where their lab brings Indigenous STS methods to new areas of chemistry and automation practice. Murphy is the author of The Economization of Life (2017), Seizing the Means of Reproduction (2012), and Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty (2006). Murphy’s current research focuses on the relationships between pollution, colonialism, and technoscience on the lower Great Lakes.

Lab: Environmental Data Justice Lab & TechnoScience Research Unit (TRU)

(Iñupiaq, she/her)

Dr. Aarons was born in and raised in Alaska. She obtained her Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Michigan in 2016, and she then received a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine, followed by the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Sarah joined the faculty at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD in 2019. Sarah’s research focuses on understanding and tracking earth surface processes as a function of a changing climate using chemistry.

Lab: Climate & Earth Surface Geochemistry Group

Lab: Indigenous Land & Data Stewards Lab

(Pinay + ??iwi, she/hers/?o ia)

Rosie Anolani Alegado is a transdisciplinary Indigenous scholar and practitioner using model systems and field experiments to investigate how ecology informs microbial evolution in a changing climate. Her lab, ME*E is an interdisciplinary ecology and evolution laboratory whose methods center research as praxis, training scholars to draw upon multiple knowledge systems to address key problems and empower communities to understand and protect their resources. Alegado has influenced national policy on ethical research practices with Indigenous communities and co-developed processes for developing sustained, equitable research partnerships with local communities. Her professional service includes memberships on the US National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine Ocean Studies Board and the US National Committee for the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

Lab: ME*E HAWAI?I (Alegado Laboratory for Microbial Ecology & Evolution in Hawai’i)

Lab: Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab

Lab: Crocker Lab

(Shinnecock, she/her) Dr. Kelsey Leonard holds a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on Indigenous Water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings. As a water scientist and legal scholar, Dr. Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of Water conservation as the foundation for international water policymaking. She represents the Shinnecock Indian Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America’s Ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. She is an enrolled citizen of Shinnecock Indian Nation.

Lab: WAMPUM lab

(Red River Métis, Scottish and British, she/her) Emily Simmonds is a critical Science and Technology Studies scholar of mixed ancestry. Her doctoral work focuses on nuclear colonialism in the Canadian context. She is a researcher at Ganawishkadawe (Tending to the Heart of the Fire), the Center for Wise Practices Indigenous Health at Women’s College Hospital, where she supports the development of care pathways, policies, and recommendations that address anti-Indigenous racism, including the disproportionate impacts of colonial industrialized environmental health hazards experienced by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. She is a founding member of the Feminist, Anti-Colonial, Anti-Imperial Nuclear Gathering (FACING Nuclear) and an alumnus of several critical justice research collectives focusing on anti-racist and anti-colonial scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, including the Technoscience Research Unit, the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory, and the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research.

(Yoruba, they/them) Mukhtara Ay?t?jú Adékúnbi Yusuf is the descendant of Yoruba tradeswomen, a?? oke weavers, onifá, and eleégún. Mukhtara is currently a visiting professor at NYU Tandon’s School of Engineering in the Integrated Design and Media program and holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an MA in Communications and Media from UCSD and an MFA in Design from UT Austin. Mukhtara’s work covers black embodiment and spatial design, racialised trauma, settler colonialism within the African context, and black and indigenous ecologies. Mukhtara is an artist, educator, designer, researcher, the founder of IL? an indigenous design and agricultural healing laboratory based in Ibadan, Nigeria, as well as the organising founder of African Indigenous Sovereignty.

Lab: IL?

(Mi’kmaq, she/her) Erica (Samms) Hurley is a Mi’kmaq woman from the west coast of Newfoundland. She has community connections through both parents with stronger connection to Flat Bay. As a youth her interest was in Indigenous health which transcended into her becoming a Registered nurse. She has taught in nursing education since 2007 and is currently a Assistant Professor with Memorial University Faculty of Nursing with a cross appointment to Humanities at Grenfell Campus. Her work is varied but includes Indigenous health, heart health, healing, wellness, Indigenous women, Indigenous historical context, culture, ceremony, methodological approaches, and so on.

(Diné, Navajo)

She is an Indigenous geneticist and public health researcher. She obtained her Bachelors of Science degree in Biology from the University of Arizona and a Masters in Clinical Science from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Currently, she works as a Professional Research Assistant at the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health at the University of Colorado School of Public Health. She graduated with her Masters of Public Health degree as a Bloomberg Scholar with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health focusing on food systems and obesity. Some of her research interests are exploring the Cultural, Clinical, Ethical, Legal, Social implications and concerns related to genomics research that include Indigenous communities. Her goal is to improve the health and wellbeing of her people as well as other Indigenous groups.

Kristen Bos is the Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit. Kristen is an Indigenous feminist researcher trained in archaeological approaches to material culture as well as an Indigenous science and technology studies (STS) researcher, who is concerned the relationship between colonial, gendered, and environmental violence. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Science and Technology Studies in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with a graduate appointment in Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto St. George campus. She is also a graduate of the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto. Kristen is urban Métis based in Toronto, but her homeland is northern Alberta where prairie transitions into boreal forest. She is also the author of the upcoming novel, The Interrogation Room (Alchemy, 2025).

Veronica Madsen (she/her) is the IndigeLab Network Coordinator. She is mixed settler/Mi’kmaq member of the Metepengiag Mi’Kmaq Nation, New Brunswick. She grew up geographically closer to Wolastoqey First Nations, NB. Her love for travel has taken her to many places in the northern hemisphere, and for many years has called Denmark home. A work opportunity brought her family to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2006 where they have lived ever since. It is here at Memorial University where she received my B.A and is continuing her education towards a M.A in Cultural Geography. Her research interests lies in community-led housing initiatives in northern Indigenous communities, more specifically, Rádey??l?? kó (Fort Good Hope, NWT). Where she has had the honour to work with and research for the K’asho Got’ine Housing Society (KGHS).