Rayna is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Climate Futures Lab studying tropical forests, socio-environmental systems, forest landscape restoration, land rights, and geospatial modeling of land use change. She applies spatial approaches to analyze social systems, focusing on conservation problems that span multiple levels and scales. She integrates quantitative spatial datasets and models with qualitative methods to understand, analyze, and communicate science surrounding human interactions with the biophysical environment.

Rayna’s postdoctoral research integrates geospatial mapping and statistical sciences with political ecology and the social sciences. She explores these methods to understand the role of forest restoration in relation to Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian (Quilombola), and agrarian-reform (assentamento) communities in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. She received her PhD in Environmental Studies from University of Colorado Boulder where she analyzed the spatial patterns and causal impacts of forest restoration, deforestation, and land rights in Brazil.