Growing up, Sisimac traveled and lived in many different countries in Latin America and the US, but always came back to the indigenous community where her family is from in the highlands of Ecuador. Here is where her interest in mountain ecosystems began, and then later, it solidified during her undergraduate studies in Ecuador. Sisimac obtained her master’s from the University of Michigan’s School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and then earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. During and after her Ph.D. (as an NSF PRFB), Sisimac worked on creating and maintaining long term climate change experiments in Andean highland ecosystems (i.e., páramo and puna).

In general, Sisimac’s research is focused on high elevation landscapes where understanding ecosystems processes is complex because of the interaction between climate, ecology, and human dynamics. To study these processes, she uses experiments and monitoring, observational studies, functional traits approaches, qualitative data collection and processing, and advanced statistics and modeling. Furthermore, she has worked and aims to continue working closely with Andean indigenous and farming communities to design and monitor ecological restoration programs, implement climate change simulation experiments, and propose adaptation strategies.

For fun, Sisimac loves to go on runs or do yoga, read sci-fi or fantasy books, and play with her energetic border collie, Maki. 

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Dr. Katherine Siegel is an assistant professor in Geography and a Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, where she is also affiliated with the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab. She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist interested in the sustainable and equitable management of ecosystems in the context of rapid environmental change. With a focus on working landscapes, she integrates diverse quantitative and qualitative data to understand the drivers of change in complex social-ecological systems and collaborates closely with land management agencies. Much of her current work focuses on the socio-environmental impacts of changing wildfire regimes in western North America, and she has ongoing work on deforestation in protected areas in the Amazon Basin. She is also active in work that advances causal inference methods for environmental and ecological applications.

In the spring, she will teach Geographic Information Science: Spatial Analytics (GEOG 4103/5103) and Earth Data Analytics (GEOG 4563/5563).

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My research program is collaborative, community oriented, and interdisciplinary. My research and teaching spans several intersecting fields in human geography, including digital geographies, Latinx & Indigenous geographies, the geohumanities, urban settler colonialism, and environmental justice. My research investigates the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Colorado and how Denver’s Indigenous communities refuse otherwise. I am currently working on a book project titled, Insurgent Cartographies & The Undoing of Settler Imaginaries. In addition to my book project, I am also exploring questions on matters of pedagogy in Latinx geographies, including the tensions, contradictions, and responsibilities of enacting Latinx geographies on Indigenous lands. As a Xicanx geographer, teacher, and organizer, I strive to be a good relative, colleague, and community member across the Latinx diaspora and beyond.

My latest paper, (Re)Mapping Native Denver & The Making of Native Assembled Counter-Cartographies is forthcoming in the journal, Geohumanities. 

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