I am an interdisciplinary public policy scholar and Professor of Community and Regional Development in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis. My work centers on a single question: when major economic and technological shifts arrive, why do they so often happen to communities and regions rather than with them — and what planning and policy tools can change that?
This is the study of economic transition governance, and it shapes everything I do. Economic “shocks” — natural disasters, downturns, and waves of technological change — rarely fall evenly. They reward some workers, firms, and regions while leaving others stranded, and the difference frequently comes down to how the transition is designed and governed, as well as the adaptive capacity and innovative capacity of the region, communities, and industries they touch rather than to the shock itself. My research examines how policy choices determine which operations and communities can navigate structural change and which cannot, and how we might build economic and workforce development systems resilient enough to support recovery and transition in their wake. I have worked in many areas including post-conflict restructuring, urban regions, and international contexts. My current work focuses primarily in rural and agricultural economies, where these dynamics are especially sharp and especially understudied.
My current projects apply this lens to AgTech, Rural Economic Development and the Digital Agricultural Revolution. Drawing on 10 years of fieldwork across West Coast specialty-crop systems and throughout US agricultural regions I’m tracing the immediate, mid-range, and long-term effects of intelligent and autonomous agricultural robotics and AI on the specialty-crop and fresh-fruit tree-crop sectors in California, Washington, and beyond. The aim is practical: to help the future farm workplace, its labor force, and the institutions that support it and those that depend upon them prepare for these technologies in ways that improve productivity and deliver equitable outcomes for workers and regions.
Across my career, three commitments anchor this work. Rigor — building empirical, peer-reviewed knowledge in public policy, industrial relations, regional studies, and economic development. Relevance — translating that knowledge into tools policymakers and stakeholders can actually use to make sense of their circumstances and act more strategically. Reach — partnering with government and non-profit leaders to inform policy debates nationally and globally. My research appears in journals including Environmental Policy and Governance, Socio Economic Review, Rural Sociology, and the Journal of Rural Studies, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the USDA-NIFA, the U.S. Department of Labor, the State of California, the University of California Office of the President, the Ford Foundation, , the Norwegian Research Council, and the German Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.
For more information on my research or teaching please refer to the Research Projects and Teaching pages.