Deborah Cheng

Deborah Cheng joined the SSRC in December 2014 as program officer of the Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, where her research focused on the politics of urban water access in Manila. Her work was funded in part by the SSRC's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) and has been published in Geoforum, Water Alternatives, and Environment and Urbanization. Prior to joining the Council, Cheng was a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, where she examined the fragmentation of water governance in LA County. She grew up in Manila and has degrees in environmental engineering from MIT and Stanford.