Dr. Sabina Shaikh is a Senior Instructional Professor in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) and the College, and the Director of Academic Programs and Director of Undergraduate Studies for CEGU. She serves as the faculty director of Chicago Studies and faculty co-lead of the Environmental Frontiers Initiative at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Her research focuses on the relationship of humans to environmental change, related to health, livelihoods and migration. Her collaborative research on water sustainability in the Mekong Basin of Cambodia has been funded by the National Science Foundation and recently by through the Center for International Social Science Research, Social Science Research Center and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago.
News and Updates
June 2022; Interview, Cook County Desirable Destination Amid Climate Change, Chicago Tonight, WTTW
April 2022: Speaker, "Migration as Adaptation to Environmental Change", DePaul Migration Collaborative Inaugural Immigration Summit: Strategies for a Migrant Planet
April 2022: Moderator, The Fire This Time: City Mayors Grapple with Climate Change Costs to Their Communities, Institute for Politics, UChicago
March 2022: Interlocutor, Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and Vanishing World in Cambodia, by Abby Seiff, Seminary Coop
October 2021: Interview, The Future of Cities in a Post-COVID-19 World, Chicago Tonight, WTTW
July 2021: Interview, How Climate Change Impacts U.S. and Global Migration. Chicago Tonight, WTTW
May 2021: News, UChicago scholar inspires students to engage with our environment, UChicago News
April 2021: The pandemic forced us to create habits that benefit the Earth and ourselves. Here's which behaviors to keep. CNN
December 2021: From his home, Attenborough shows viewers a perfect planet. Chicago Tribune.
July 2020: Environmental Frontiers: "Environmental Frontiers: Collaborative Campus Sustainability Studies at the University of Chicago", presented at the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences Annual Conference.
January 2020: Faculty Fellowship, Center for International Social Sciences Research for Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh
December 2019: Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh receives funding award from the Neubauer Collegium on Culture and Society.
October 2019: “The Association between Environmental Quality and Diabetes in the U.S” published in Journal of Diabetes Investigation. (Jagai, J.S., A.K. Krajewski, S. Shaikh, L.A. Dwyer-Lindgren, D.T. Lob-dell, and R.M. Sargis)
October 2019: "Building Equitable Institutions for Coping with Environmental Change in Rural Cambodia" presented at the 2nd Annual Sustainability and Development Conference in Ann Arbor MI, October 2019 (with A. Kolata, J. Postigo, A. Oppenheimer & Y. Wen)
July 2019: Op-ed in Crain’s Chicago, “It’s a challenge, but Chicago has opportunities to add parkland,”
May 2018: "Underutilized and Under Threat: Environmental Policy as a Tool to Address Diabetes Risk." Published in Current Diabetes Reports, (Shaikh, S., J S. Jagai, C. Ashley, S. Zhou and R.M. Sargis)
February 2018: View CISSR Faculty Fellows Alan Kolata and Sabina Shaikh's photographic account of their recent field work in Cambodia.
February 2018: Sabina Shaikh cited in City Lab article Big Data Suggests Big Potential for Urban Farming.
February 2018: Sabina Shaikh and Alan Kolata receive faculty seed grants from the Social Science Research Center for their project "Economic, Social and Environmental Drivers of Rural to Urban Migration in the Lower Mekong River Basin of Cambodia."
February 2018: Sabina Shaikh and Alan Kolata receive 2018/19 CISSR Faculty Fellowship renewal awards for Cambodian Mekong research.
October 2017: Sabina Shaikh interviews Impossible Foods CEO Dr. Pat Brown on Science, Sustainability and the Future of Food at the Polsky Exchange on 10/19.
December 2017: "Economics, Sport and the Environment: Incentives and Intersections," with Allen Sanderson published as a chapter in the Handbook of Sport and the Environment.
Projects
Shaikh, S. and E. Talen. Our Urban Future. MIT Press. Forthcoming 2023.
Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh, Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, University of Chicago 2020-2023
Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh, Center for International Social Science Research, University of Chicago. 2020-2021.
Economic, Social and Environmental Drivers of Rural to Urban Migration in the Lower Mekong River Basin of Cambodia. Social Science Research Center, University of Chicago 2018-2020
Courses
Environmental and Urban Studies BA Thesis Colloquium (Autumn 2022)
Economics and Environmental Policy (Autumn 2022)
Urban Design with Nature, co-taught with Emily Talen (Spring 2023)
Water: Economics, Policy and Society
Urban Spaces and Unnatural Disasters: Humans-Nature Connections in Cities