Who We Are

Michelle Martinez, Inaugural Director of the Tishman Center

Michelle Martinez (MS ’08), a SEAS graduate, was appointed in July 2022 as the inaugural director of the Tishman Center. Martinez studied under Professor Emeritus Bunyan Bryant, and will continue to build on Bryant’s legacy of activism and involvement in grassroots movements. In her new role as inaugural director, she has developed courses on power building, community organizing and critical environmental justice, as well as anchoring powerful initiatives that support students who are pursuing lifelong careers in environmental and climate justice. In her first two years, she has supported research projects such as Dallas Black Clergy, expanding environmental justice programming within Faith in Texas; growing the Green New Deal Network’s Cities Program; spurring environmental justice within the Mata Tripta Gurudwara of SE Michigan; and fighting toxic pollution from fossil transit on the Great Lakes with Freshwater Futures, among others.

Martinez has 18 years of experience practicing environmental justice in her hometown of Detroit. Most recently, she served as executive director of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition; she is a founding member of the Coalition. Martinez also serves on the board of directors of We the People Michigan and is a contributing columnist to Planet Detroit, an online publication serving Detroit audiences with climate and environmental news. 

Dr. Kyle Whyte, Faculty Director

Kyle Whyte, the George Willis Pack Professor at SEAS, is the founding faculty director of the Tishman Center. In this role he will provide overall leadership. He is the principal investigator of the Energy Equity Project, and affiliate professor of Native American Studies and Philosophy. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Whyte is also serving as a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Mary Beth Jäger, Project Manager

Mary Beth Jäger feels excited and privileged to be working with fellow Citizen Potawatomi member Dr. Whyte, Tishman Director Martinez and fellow staff and students of the Tishman Center. Jäger serves as a research coordinator and telecommutes from the Seattle area.

Before starting at Tishman, Mary Beth worked as a decade long telecommuter and research analyst at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona. Over the last several years, Jäger served as a co-lead for the Indigenous Foods Knowledges Network, (NSF-OPP Award#1745499), a research coordination network bringing together Indigenous individuals from the Arctic and US Southwest around food sovereignty and resilience. Currently, she serves as an experienced co-lead for the Fostering Indigenous-led Research Convergence Work Group hosted by the NSF funded Navigating the New Arctic-Community Office. One key aspect of these two projects is co-producing knowledge with fellow Indigenous collaborators. Jäger believes in advancing justice and equity through co-production and collaborating with Indigenous communities and communities marginalized to leverage research to their benefit. She looks forward to opportunities of this at the Tishman Center.

Outside of work Jäger is a tamale enthusiast, food on the water admirer, sweet on pan dulce, fangirl of the Three Sisters and the list goes on. Besides being a big fan of food, Jäger believes food is medicine and central to culture.
 

Paula Astudillo, Senior Project Manager

Paula Astudillo (Master in Education – U of M 2011) brings her passion for education justice and collective people empowerment, which was lastly sharpened while working in the research and evaluation office of Detroit Public School Community District and mentoring women and LGBTQ+ of color in STEMM and open science projects with diverse communities in the US. At the Tishman Center, Paula is the Project Coordinator, dedicated to fostering an empowering workplace climate, especially for our environmental justice students. Paula’s primary focus is cultivating an organizational culture centered on care, collegiality, and mutual support.

Paula participated in grassroots social justice movements in her home country, Chile, and her new home in Detroit, Michigan. She has built her career around her passions for educational equity, gender equity, youth empowerment, environmental justice, and strengthening marginalized communities’ self- determination, power, and organizational capacity.

Tony G. Reames, Associate Professor; Tishman Professor of Environmental Justice; Director SEAS Detroit Sustainability Clinic

Dr. Tony Reames is the Tishman Professor of Environmental Justice and an Associate Professor, widely recognized for his scholarship and senior government leadership in environmental and energy justice.

Dr. Reames founded the Urban Energy Justice Lab and the Energy Equity Project and currently serves as Director of the U-M SEAS Detroit Sustainability Clinic. His research centers on advancing fair and equitable access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy, and on examining the root causes and persistence of energy disparities across race, income, and geography.

Jessica Martínez Cruz, Post-Doc Fellow. 2024-2026

I am a scholar-activist and educator working at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. I have over fifteen years of experience working with social collectives on memory and violence. My background grew from academia, feminist activism, and my life experience as a Central American woman living in the US. My research aims to understand the relationship between power, knowledge production, and the continuum of violence experienced by colonized peoples in the Americas. Specifically, I focus on violence towards community knowledge holders and black, brown, and Indigenous women and girls in Central America and the Caribbean within a framework of structural justice. As a brown feminist scholar-activist, I reflect on the critical role that academia plays in promoting anti-violence and justice frameworks through dialogue with civil society practitioners and community organizers. I have co-organized activities to encourage these dialogues, such as the Regional Encounter and Workshop on Radical Methodologies in Contested Places: Approaching Decolonization in Central America in 2018 in Managua, Nicaragua, and most recently, Intersectional Environmentalism in San Juan, Puerto Rico, last March. My ultimate goal is to connect the experiences of people enduring colonial violence from a hemispheric perspective and continue participating in community efforts and advocacy processes.

Dr. HARSHIT Sosan LAKRA

Dr. Harshit Sosan Lakra will be serving for the next two years as a Fulbright Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow, in SEAS under the mentorship of Prof Kyle Whyte. During her fellowship, Harshit will be working on Contextualizing the Impact of Co-Planning, Co-Designing, and Co-Learning on Indigenous People, Classroom Learning, and Stakeholders in India and the USA from the Perspective of Housing, Culture, and Environment.
Harshit is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Through her institution she has been involved in several projects with Tribal Youths across India, specifically in the states of Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Manipur, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh. Her work spans various domains, including:

• Housing for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups: Leading research on housing scenarios as Principal Investigator.
• Sustainable Land and Forest Management for Carbon Credits: Promoting environmental conservation while generating economic opportunities as Principal Investigator.
• Fintech and Indigenous Knowledge: Integrating traditional knowledge with modern financial technologies to empower communities as Co-Investigator.
• Tribal Development Index: Creating a comprehensive tool to assess and enhance the well-being of tribal populations as Principal Investigator.

Harshit is trained as an architect from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT) Bhopal. She completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Environmental Planning from the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology (CEPT) Ahmedabad and received an International Ford Fellowship (2007-2009), which allowed her to pursue a second Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at Cornell University, New York. Harshit is also a recipient of the Himalayan University Consortium Fellowship and co-leads the Cross-cutting HUC Workgroup on Open Geospatial-Based Case Study Building and Cross-Learning. Outside of her academic work, Harshit enjoys dancing, particularly tribal folk dance, tribal cuisine and has been making short films about traditional practices with her team.

Dr. Sarah Nahar

Dr. Sarah Nahar (she) graduated in May 2025 from Syracuse University in Religion with a dissertation entitled, “Fertile, Social, Dangerous, Sacred, Gift, and System: Religion, Salt City Harvest Farm, and the Future of Human Shit.” She simultaneously matriculated at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry and wrote an additional dissertation entitled, “Dealing with our Crap, Literally and Metaphorically: Ecological Sanitation in Context of Environmental Studies and Religion.” She recently coined the terms Excreta Infrastructure Technology (ExIT) system, defecatory justice, and excretory justice. She will teach at the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment.