Social Sciences Division
PhD Student
Graduate
Nat Sci 2 Main Building
489
Environmental Studies
PwintPhyu Nandar is a PhD student, focusing on access to culturally desirable foods in urban and peri-urban areas. This area of focus is important to PwintPhyu, as a Burmese immigrant/settler in the United States who is always thinking about where to get the ingredients necessary to make home-cooked Burmese meals. Although food has always been the way to her heart, her introduction to food systems comes from an environmental science background and a passion for understanding human-environment interactions. After learning about environmental injustice as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she realized that her community in Richmond, California was experiencing environmental racism at the hands of the Chevron Refinery. That moment led her to major in Environmental Science, concentrating on environmental justice issues. She pivoted into studying food systems to better understand how food sits at the intersection of culture, urbanizaition, and sustainability. For her master's thesis at Yale School of the Environment, PwintPhyu researched how Greater New Haven residents access their cultural foods by collecting surveys and cooking with residents.
Education
2024 Master of Environmental Science from Yale School of the Environment
2019 Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sceince from University of California, Los Angeles; concentration in Environmental Systems in Society
2024 - NextGen Fellowship; USDA
2023 - Global Food Fellowship; Yale Sustainable Food Program
2023 - Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Summer Student Research Grant
2021 - Staff Appreciation and Recognition (STAR) Award, UCLA Campus Human Resources
2019 - Dean’s Prize - Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, UCLA Undergraduate Research Center for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
2018 - Jesse Graham Award, UCLA Undergraduate Research Center for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
2015 - Anita and Julius Zelman Scholarship, UCLA
Taylor, D. E., Bell, A., Treloar, D., Ajani, A., Alvarez, M., Hamilton, T., Velazquez, J., Nandar, P., Fillwalk, L., & Ard, K. J. (2024). Defying the Food Desert, Food Swamp, and Supermarket Redlining Stereotypes in Detroit: Comparing the Distribution of Food Outlets in 2013 and 2023. Sustainability, 16(16), 7109. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16167109
Other Publications:
Nandar, PwintPhyu. 2019. “Gender and Intergenerational Knowledge in Los Angeles Immigrant Households.” Gender and Everyday Water Use in Los Angeles Working Paper Series, no. 4, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Los Angeles, CA. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nf5r727