Titles

• Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
• Associate Professor, School of Transborder Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Affiliated Faculty, Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation

Biography

Maria Cruz-Torres is a socio-cultural anthropologist who specializes in environmental, applied and economic anthropology. Her areas of teaching and research are gender and globalization; gender, sustainability and the environment; political ecology; women and work in the informal economic sector; impact of globalization upon local communities and households; and the environmental and social aspects of fisheries and aquaculture development. Professor Cruz-Torres geographic areas of interest are Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently she is conducting research on the topic of gender, globalization, and the environment in Mexico, and is also involved in a National Science Foundation interdisciplinary, transnational collaborative research project focusing on the links between human and biophysical processes in coastal marine ecosystems in Baja California, Mexico. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes.

Professor Cruz-Torres' teaching reflects many of her research interests and she has developed and taught the following undergraduate and graduate courses: (1) Gender, Culture and Development (2) Gender and Globalization in Latin America; (3) Gender, Sustainability and Social Justice,; and (4) Gender, Globalization and Sustainability. These courses examine current issues facing women in Third World Countries, the manner in which gender shapes and is shaped by globalization processes, and promoting and achieving sustainability and social justice.

Education

• PhD, Rutgers University, 1991
• MA, Rutgers University, 1987
• BS, University of Puerto Rico, 1985

Expertise

• urban social-ecological systems
• coastal and marine life
• water resources and treatment
• food
• conservation
• immigration/emigration
• natural resources
• gender
• urban affairs/planning
• climate change
• agriculture
• economic development
• ecology
• Life Below Water
• Gender Equality
• Reduced Inequalities
• human ecology
• climate change impacts
• food policy
• fisheries management
• urban development
• marine ecology
• economic anthropology
• poverty
• land use and land cover
• food systems
• agrarian societies
• migration
• fisheries
• natural resource management