Graduate Student Kymberley Chu's journalistic reportage for Macaranga has been recently cited on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's preprint in June 2024 and cited in an editorial letter for Science entitled "Pig Virus Imperils Food Security in Borneo" earlier this year by natural scientists. Her journalistic project was funded by Internews Malaysia/European Union in 2022 and she collaborated with photographer Alven Chang on the topic of Indigenous Kadazan-Dusun and Murut food security during Asian Swine Fever (ASF) in Malaysian Borneo. 

Chu is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department. In her ethnographic work, she examines a wide range of human-nonhuman primate interfaces in Peninsular Malaysia. Kym is interested in how scientific paradigms such as ecology and its behavioral research methodologies mediate social relations between her human interlocutors and the free-ranging monkeys they interact with. Acknowledging local variations in environmental stressors and the ongoing power dynamics of capitalism and colonialism, Kym analyzes how particular anthropocentric constructs of the environment are being imposed. In turn, these constructs influence how human communities culturally perceive the anthropogenic drivers of human-nonhuman animal conflict in Malaysia. By approaching environmental justice as navigating coalitional affinities, she will collaborate with involved parties such as conservationists, orchard farmers, food vendors, forest rangers, ecotourism workers, priests, plantation owners, and urban residents.