AESEDA News :: Tschakert Named Director of AESEDA Center for Sustainable Mining
Dr. Petra Tschakert, Assistant Professor of Geography and the Alliance for Earth Sciences, Engineering, and Development in Africa (AESEDA), has been named Director of the AESEDA Center for Sustainable Mining. In this new role, Tschakert plans to coordinate collaborative and interdisciplinary faculty research and outreach and learning activities related to sustainable mining initiatives in Africa. She advocates a systems approach to mining that addresses the multifaceted complexities of georesource management and development. This means to link technical, ecological, and economic thinking with an understanding of social, cultural, institutional, and political drivers to promote environmentally responsible and socially just mining engineering in Africa.
Tschakert has a PhD in Arid Lands Resource Sciences with a minor in Applied Anthropology from the University of Arizona. She joined Penn State in 2005. Most of her research is on human-environment interactions. She has been working in West Africa since 1992, mainly with poor and disadvantaged resource users, initially on soil management, household food security, and desertification and more recently on climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as small-scale gold mining. She is PI on two PSU grants on human-environmental health and sustainable livelihoods among marginal gold miners in Ghana and Co-PI on an NIH-funded educational project on global health and georesource management in Nigeria.