Dr. Brandon Marc Finn is a faculty member at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Finn received his PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard University in 2022. He leads The Informal Sustainability Lab at the University of Michigan and researches mining and urbanization. Finn is also a member of the Urban Sustainability Research Group.

Finn’s work recognizes that unregulated and unregistered labor constitutes the predominant form of economic activity around the world. Similarly, informal housing is a defining feature of global urbanization trends. Despite these realities, sustainability scholarship overlooks these modes of life, thereby creating development and sustainability models that fail to address or account for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, places, and environments. 

Finn's current work assesses the role of artisanal and small-scale informal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the intersection of electronic waste and urbanization in Accra, Ghana. More broadly, Finn researches the sustainability tradeoffs associated with industrial and artisanal mining for the green transition.

Finn is leading efforts to establish a new subfield in Geography and sustainability-related scholarship under the theme 'informal sustainability.' This subfield recognizes the importance of informality as a livelihood strategy that enables survival and upward socio-economic mobility, but also interrogates its tensions with sustainability-related outcomes.