Udita Sanga, a doctoral student in the Department of Community Sustainability, is interested in studying farmers’ adaptation and resilience to climate change using system dynamics and agent-based modelling approaches.
Sanga was one of the organizing members of the MSU Environmental Science and Policy Program (ESPP) research symposium entitled, “International Research Collaborations – Addressing Environmental Challenges,” held in October 2015. The symposium focused on enhancing and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars across disciplines and geographies working on issues surrounding sustainability science and current global environmental challenges.
She has served as the team leader, and co-principal investigator (PI), of a student-led Graduate Pursuit project funded by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). Graduate Pursuits are independent synthesis projects of individual research teams, composed of five to seven graduate students with diverse backgrounds and disciplines, who bring together social and environmental data to address critical socio-environmental research questions. Their project is entitled, “Modelling Adaptation and Vulnerability to Climate Risks from the ‘Ground Up’: A Case of Smallholder Agriculturists across North India.”
“As a team leader, the project has given me hand-on experience in interdisciplinary problem solving and project design, as well as interdisciplinary networking and team leadership,” Sanga said. “I have also been involved in engagement and liaising with stakeholders and international research organizations at Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR) who will be the end users of the models and policy recommendations developed in the project.”
As a student, Sanga is also involved in two projects which are jointly collaborating to study climate change adaptation and food security in the drylands of West Africa, specifically Mali. She recently received a Small Opportunities grant, from START International Organization, to conduct field work during the fall of 2016.
“I designed an innovative role-playing board game which uses a participatory, game-based, approach to understanding farmer decision-making and cognitive strategies surrounding food production, distribution, and consumption under various climate scenarios,” Sanga said. “I traveled to Mali in October to test and pilot the ‘Food & Farm’ board game with farmers in Southern Mali. The game, apart from being a data collection tool, also proved to be a good educational tool for farmers. It helped them look at their farming activities and decisions under climatic risks from a larger systems perspective. It also helped them understand the costs and benefits of adaptation strategies implemented by them.”
Sanga believes that developing leadership skills in academia is extremely important, especially in fields where we embrace interdisciplinary research and science to develop sustainable solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems.
“Scientists and researchers don’t work in isolation anymore,” she said. “Instead, we collaborate with our students, peers, stakeholders, politicians and policymakers. Developing leadership skills, early on in our career enhances our capacity to collaborate more effectively, to communicate more openly, and to understand each other more deeply, so that we can work towards a collective vision for a better future.”
Sanga plans to use the $2,000 COGS Leadership Endowment Fellowship award to organize training workshops in Mali/Ghana where there has been a demonstrated interest in the use of the “Food & Farm” game as an educational and participatory modelling tool.
“Receiving the COGS Leadership Award is a tremendous source of encouragement for me. It is also a recognition of the sacrifices that my parents have made to help me pursue a higher educational degree,” Sanga said. “When I graduate, I will be the first person in my immediate, as well as extended, family to have earned a Ph.D. degree. It would not have been possible without my family and teachers who have shaped me to reach this point in my academic, research and community engagement work. I thank COGS for this recognition and for the opportunity to showcase our research and leadership activities within the graduate student community at MSU.”
