Associate Director, Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, Claremont College
Shannon is the Director of Community and Global Engagement at the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, also known as “The Hive,” at Claremont College. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher in conservation education, evaluation, and community engagement at the San Diego Zoo, building on her PhD work in the Evolution and Ecology track in Stanford's Anthropology department. Her scholarship focuses on human-environment relations and the impact of human-animal interactions on infectious disease outbreaks. Her dissertation research explored the roles of social capital and rural-to-urban migration as drivers of urban demand for wild meat in Cameroon. Shannon has worked in Africa since 2000 on various projects exploring the bushmeat trade, political ecology of indigenous land and natural resource rights in coastal Kenya, human perceptions of medicine and natural resources in Zambia, Uganda and Cameroon and the feasibility of payment for ecosystem services projects in Central Africa.