Academic

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2013) and a Master of Science in Cultural and Environmental Resource Management from Central Washington University (2021). My master's training was intentionally interdisciplinary, integrating anthropology, geography, economics, and policy, and provided a foundation for applied research on food systems, institutions, and environmental decision-making.

My master's thesis, Higher Education and Food Access: A Case Study of Food Access Initiatives and Their Community Impact¹, examined how institutional structures, community initiatives, and lived experience shape food access on a university campus. Through more than 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork, I documented campus food systems, hunger relief efforts, and community-driven responses to food insecurity. Findings from this work informed institutional efforts to address food insecurity and reinforced my interest in how social systems, values, and lived experience influence decision-making.

[1]  Wheaton, Rebecca. "Higher Education and Food Access: A Case Study of Food Access Initiatives and Their Community Impact." https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/1795/. (2022). 

Professional

I bring more than a decade of experience working across environmental nonprofits, education, agriculture, applied research, and community-based programs. Throughout my career, I have collaborated with nonprofits, county and state agencies, and community organizations to develop community-informed approaches to complex social and environmental challenges.

My work has taken me across North Carolina, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, where I have served in roles ranging from environmental education and farm-based programming to program evaluation and mixed-methods research. Across these experiences, a common thread has been a commitment to applied, collaborative scholarship and a curiosity about how people understand their environments, institutions, and communities. These experiences continue to shape my approach to research, teaching, and public engagement.