Christian Rivera ’14 has served as an Environmental Research and Teaching Fellow in the High Meadows Environmental Institute and an Affiliated Scholar in the Department of Anthropology since Fall 2022. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, M.A. from Columbia University, and B.A. from Princeton University. Christian’s interdisciplinary research program draws on his training in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology and the human dimensions of conservation. His work aims to advance theory and practice under three broad themes: multispecies relations and interactions, dynamics of social-ecological systems, and conservation science. He has over ten years of experience working on issues of biodiversity conservation, hunting and wildlife trade, natural resource management, biocultural conservation, and ethnoprimatology in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and Latin America. 

Throughout his time at Princeton, Christian has collaborated with his postdoctoral mentors Agustín Fuentes (Anthropology) and David Wilcove (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; Princeton School of Public and International Affairs) to integrate approaches in anthropology and conservation biology towards understanding issues of wildlife use and conservation in human-dominated environments. This entailed over six months of fieldwork in the Amazon city of Iquitos, Peru, the most populated city in the world with no road access. During Summer 2024, he hosted three undergraduate students for an 8-week internship in Iquitos through the High Meadows Environmental Institute Summer Internship Program. Christian trained the students, Ruth Rocker ’26 (Anthropology), Will Travis ’26 (Psychology), and Miguel Caireta Camps ’26 (Philosophy), in diverse methods (participant observation, field notes, structured surveys, media analysis) to study the relationship between tourism, human-animal encounters, and conservation in the urbanizing Amazon. In January 2025 he returned to Iquitos with Will Travis ’26 to share preliminary findings with local collaborators and stakeholders in Peru.

In addition to his interdisciplinary research, Christian developed two new courses at Princeton that integrated concepts in anthropology and conservation science. In Fall 2023 he taught FRS 109: The Wildlife Trade and in Fall 2024 taught ENV/ANT/EEB 307: Systems Approaches to Conservation, both which apply the tools of systems thinking to explore the relationships between biological and cultural diversity across diverse conservation contexts.

Christian’s postdoctoral work has led to the authoring and co-authoring of 10 manuscripts and one report during his time at Princeton (published or at final stages of preparation), with four of the publications co-authored by his undergraduate students and mentees. Publication topics include: cultural roles of primates in an Amazonian urban center; integrating primatology and criminology to study the live primate trade; tourism and human-animal encounters in the globalizing Amazon; social-ecological drivers of the wildlife trade; and advancing pedagogy in biodiversity conservation education, among others. He has also served as Associate Editor of the journal Human Dimensions of Wildlife since 2024.

In Fall 2025, Christian will start a tenure-track faculty position at the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts - Boston. His work will focus on advancing inter- and trans-disciplinary research on the conservation of biological and biocultural diversity in urban ecosystems. Prior to beginning his position, he will spend summer 2025 working with two undergraduate students to establish the foundations for a new project on biocultural diversity and wildlife use in coastal cities, with an initial case study focused on New York City.