PhD candidate, Bruno Ubiali, was selected as a 2026 recipient of the UGA Graduate School's Dissertation Completion Award. Bruno, a candidate in the ICON and Anthropology programs at UGA is studying under Dr. Don Nelson and is a member of the Humans and Environmental Change Lab (HECLab). This research group focuses on understanding human-environment interactions in contexts of social and environmental change. Bruno's dissertation research aims to understand the locally devised strategies by smallholder farmers to maintain control over the land in an agricultural frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. Bruno completed seventeen months of fieldwork in 2024 and 2025 and a variety of ethnographic and geospatial methods to investigate the smallholder farming communities in the Curuá-Una region of Santarém, Brazilian Amazon specifically the expansion of industrial monocultures in the region and the challenges posed by land-use change. After graduating, Bruno plans to continue to teach and conduct theoretical and applied research that not only produces new knowledge but places local communities' concerns at the forefront of investigation. Join us in congratulating Bruno on receiving this award and join us in Spring 2026 for dissertation defense. More details to come.
