Alexandria Casteel

Alexandria Casteel is a research scientist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR), where she serves as a strategic aide to the Director of Watershed and Climate Services. The unit's 11 centers cover everything from restoration finance to marine policy. Casteel helps the director carry out a 10-year strategic plan that brings these efforts together across the state. She tracks progress toward restoration and climate resilience goals, maps funding and partner investments, supports policy research, and identifies new ways for the centers to collaborate. The position builds on her interest in the partnerships that sustain research over time.

 

Before joining DNR, she spent two years as a Life on a Sustainable Planet Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC. There, she conducted ethnographic research with federal environmental justice practitioners and served as an invited panelist at a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy convening on environmental justice science. Casteel earned her PhD from Dartmouth College's Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society program, which brings together the natural and social sciences. Her dissertation drew on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork with communities across Baltimore, including church organizations that care for patches of urban forest and groups that focus on nature-based strategies for Black resilience and healing. She also worked closely with the Baltimore field office of the US Forest Service, whose staff has strong ties with environmental organizations throughout the city.

 

Casteel has a strong foundation in cultural anthropology, environmental studies, and the theory and methods of ethnography. She also holds a master's degree in anthropology, environment, and development from University College London, where she studied how small-scale farmers in rural Belize adapt to climate change. Away from the office, Casteel practices yoga, heads out on hiking trails, and spends time with her dog.