Paulo Massoca, Ph.D.

Mentor: Tiffany Roberts Briggs, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Charles E. Schmidt College of Science Department of Geosciences

Paulo Massoca, Ph.D., is a social-environmental researcher interested in understanding how societies have interacted with their surrounding environment, past and present, and how that interaction has shaped and transformed each other.

His research examines how society values, social and cultural institutions, economic and market incentives, public policies and governance arrangements mediate decision-making on land use and land cover changes, looking at their implications for forest loss and regrowth dynamics, natural resources management and peoples' livelihoods.

Massoca earned a doctorate degree in environmental science from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and a minor in human dimensions of global environmental change from the Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington. He also earned a master’s in tropical forest science from Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. This integrative training equipped him with methodological and analytical tools and skills from the social and environmental sciences to work collaboratively across interdisciplinary boundaries.

He uses mixed methods and multivariate analysis to integrate fieldwork in forest plots and participant observation in case studies with data from interviews, national census, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, archival research and discourse analysis.

Much of Massoca's research has been conducted in the Amazon River basin, notably in Brazil, and more recently in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Website:
https://sites.google.com/view/paulo-massoca/research-agenda