Meet your 2025-2026 CASEL Lab Manager, Adriana!

Adriana Abreu is the Lab Manager for CASEL, where she is the connective force behind the lab’s day-to-day operations and its vibrant intellectual community. In this role, Adriana coordinates lab activities, plans interdisciplinary forums, and creates spaces that foster collaboration, dialogue, and shared purpose across disciplines.

A Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and an Amazonian environmental anthropologist, Adriana brings over a decade of activist-scholarship focused on community-based natural resource management, conservation, gender equity, development, and socioenvironmental challenges in the Brazilian Amazônia. Her work centers the knowledge, resilience, and leadership of rural and Indigenous communities navigating socioenvironmental conflict.

Adriana is a former Amazon Rainforest Fund grantee and contributed to the Pulitzer Center–supported project “Quilombolas, Invisible Protectors of the Forest, in Sight of COVID-19.” Her current research examines how formal governance structures and social norms intersect in community-based arapaima fisheries management, as part of the NSF-funded project “Integrating Cross-scale Socio-Ecological Feedbacks in Freshwater Fisheries,” co-led by Professor Eduardo Brondizio.

At CASEL, Adriana combines rigorous scholarship with deep care for community—bringing people together, amplifying interdisciplinary exchange, and helping the lab thrive as a collaborative and welcoming space.