New faculty join School of Human Evolution and Social Change

This fall, three new faculty members with expertise in water access and security as well as primatology are joining Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

Assistant Professor Mariam Abazeri is an environmental social scientist who comes from the University of Miami. Abazeri has been a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Human Evolution for the past two years. Her research focuses on how communities adjust to a changing climate and economy.

Assistant Teaching Professor Rose Sommerhauser is an evolutionary anthropologist with training in biological anthropology and primatology, joining ASU from Washington University in St. Louis. Sommerhauser’s research focuses on biodiversity and species interactions that offer a comparative lens that extends to humans.

Assistant Professor Patrick Thomson is an environmental social scientist from the University of Oxford with training in engineering and water security. Thomson joined ASU in 2025 to help lead Arizona Water for All, part of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative. His research focuses on how we can design water systems for communities despite changing environments. 

In the following Q&As, Abazeri, Sommerhauser and Thomson talk more about their research and careers.

Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

Question: Can you tell us about your research and interest areas?

Answer: I study how communities that depend on local ecosystems and their natural resources — farmers, pastoralists, coastal and rural residents — navigate a changing climate and a changing economy. I'm especially interested in water: who has access to it, how it's shared and governed, and what happens when it becomes scarce. Much of my earlier work took place in Iran, where I spent years collaborating with rural women who used filmmaking to document and respond to the changes reshaping their lives.

These days, my research has taken me to Costa Rica, where I'm looking at how communities manage groundwater as tourism and agriculture place growing demands on it. Across all of this work, what draws me in is the same question: how people draw on their own knowledge, traditions and creativity to care for the places they call home.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your career?

A: The people, without question. This work is built on relationships — with the communities I collaborate with, with colleagues across fields, and with students. I get to spend time listening to how people understand the world around them, and then help turn those conversations into something shared, whether that's research, a community project or a film. I also love that no two years look alike. The questions keep evolving, the places change and there's always something new to learn. That sense of ongoing discovery is what keeps me excited to show up every day.

Q: You were previously a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. What have you enjoyed most about being a part of ASU and the school?

A: What I've enjoyed most is the intellectual energy here. The School of Human Evolution and Social Change brings together people asking big questions about how humans relate to their environments, past and present — and conversations with colleagues regularly send my own thinking in new directions. ASU is a place where collaboration comes naturally and where there's real appetite for research that connects to the world beyond the campus, and that suits how I like to work.

Question: Can you tell us about your research and interest areas?

Answer: My research focuses on primate behavioral ecology, evolution and conservation, with a particular interest in the diversity and distribution of primate communities — why different species occur where they do, how they coexist, and what ecological conditions shape those patterns. Broadly, these are questions about biodiversity and species interactions that offer a comparative lens extending to humans as well.

I am also interested in how biological and cultural evolutionary histories intersect with environmental and social conditions. I approach much of this through a One Health framework, which treats the health of humans, other animals and the environments we share as interconnected. So I look at how cultural beliefs and social practices shape people's relationships with other species and ecosystems, and what those relationships can mean for conservation and health. My research extends into the classroom as well. I have started developing citizen science projects that give undergraduates opportunities to contribute to longitudinal data collection and participate directly in the research process.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your career?

A: What I enjoy most are the moments when students start making connections and thinking through a question or idea in a new way — when they have that eureka moment! I love teaching anthropology, but even more than that, I love giving them an anthropological lens for looking at the world and helping them learn to examine evidence, sit with complexity and stay open to the idea that there's more than one useful way of approaching a problem, especially when a perspective challenges their own. Anthropology asks us to hold multiple perspectives at once, and there is something especially rewarding about watching students learn to do that for themselves.

I also value the one-on-one conversations with students and the mentoring side of the job. Whether I am advising someone about their courses or graduate school, talking through possible career paths, sharing experiences from my own journey as it relates to theirs, or supporting a research project, I love helping students figure out where their interests might take them, connecting them with opportunities and resources, and seeing their confidence grow along the way.

Q: Anything else you would like others at ASU to know about you?

A: I love talking about primates, but I'm just as excited by the bigger questions that lead us to ask about evolution, ecology, health and ourselves. I hold students to high expectations, but I also make sure they have full support along the way. Students do their best work when they understand not just what's expected of them, but why it matters. As I make Arizona home, I'm ready to be a sponge and soak up everything the Grand Canyon State has to offer, so send me your recommendations for places to see, things to do and experiences I shouldn't miss! Outside of work, I enjoy cooking and trying new recipes, taking long drives with my husband in our 1967 MGB GT, and doing my best not to upset the head of our household — Amelia, our 9-year-old Maine Coon.

Question: Can you tell us about your research and interest areas?

Answer: The question underlying much of my research is: How do we design water systems that work for people, and keep them working in challenging — and changing — environments? We are quite good at developing innovations that work and demonstrating that they work in a controlled environment. The harder questions come later: Who maintains them? Who pays? Can they adapt? And did they actually improve people’s lives?

My work has ranged from sensors and machine learning for rural water infrastructure to establishing FundiFix, an independent water-service organization in Kenya that is still operating more than a decade later. More recently, I’ve helped develop the Modular, Adaptive and Decentralized (MAD) water systems concept, thinking beyond conventional centralized infrastructure toward water systems that can be more flexible, distributed and responsive to communities. These systems are relevant to areas where piped, treated water is unlikely to ever reach, such as rural Arizona, but also in post-conflict situations where rebuilding large centralized systems destroyed by fighting may not be the most effective or sustainable response.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your career?

A: I enjoy taking an idea from “Could this work?” to “How do we make this work reliably in the real world?” The joy of this question is that to answer it, you immediately move from considering a technological problem to the complex human and environmental realities, and the interdisciplinary work required to understand these. ASU — and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in particular — is the perfect place to pursue this research.

Q: What have you enjoyed most about being a part of ASU thus far, working on the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative, and what are you looking forward to about joining the faculty at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change?

A: In my relatively short time at ASU, I have met and worked with an enormously diverse range of people, not just in terms of background and life experience, but also intellectual background and academic discipline. The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative is a case in point. It was also a project in which we were researching the water issues in our own backyard. I’m particularly excited about joining the School of Human Evolution and Social Change because I bring an engineering and implementation perspective to problems that are also fundamentally social, cultural, environmental and political. I’m looking forward to learning from my new colleagues and finding the unexpected collaborations that come from putting different perspectives together.