Dr. Stephen Perz, PhD
Stephen Perz received his PhD in sociology with a specialization in demography from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. He is an affiliate of UF’s Center for Latin American Studies and UF’s School of Natural Resourcesand Environment. He has conducted research in the Amazon on migration into frontier regions, socio-economic drivers of land use and land cover change, socio-spatial processes of road building, the social-ecological impacts of infrastructure, and the political ecology of environmental governance. He has received more than $17 million in funding from NASA, NSF, USAID, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and other sources, for research as well as applied conservation and development work. He focuses primarily on the southwestern Amazon, specifically the tri-national frontier where Bolivia, Brazil and Peru meet. His work features collaboration across disciplinary, national and organizational boundaries. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals and books. In 2016, he published his book on the challenges and strategic practices of spanning boundaries in research and environmental management, Crossing Boundaries for Collaboration: Conservation and Development Projects in the Amazon. In 2019, he edited an international volume on the topic, Collaboration Across Boundaries for Social-Ecological Systems Science: Experiences Around the World. In addition to serving as a member of nearly 40 graduate committees, he has chaired over 30 PhD dissertation and MA thesis students in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the School of Natural Resources and Environment. In 2014, he was named a UF Foundation Preeminence Term Professor. In 2015, he was selected the UF International Educator of the Year for Senior Faculty. From 2016 to 2019, he was named a UF Term Professor. He won a CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 2018-2019.
