Shelly Annette Biesel is postdoctoral researcher in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University—where she collaborates on the ERC-funded project Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change. As part of a comparative, multi-sited team, she explores how community-based climate infrastructures reshape socio-political relations and environmental governance across comparative contexts in the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States.

 From 2023-2025 Shelly was a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the U.S. National Park Service and affiliate Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at University of Maine. Her research investigated how Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge can inform more inclusive and adaptive coastal environmental governance at U.S. National Parks. This work was rooted in partnerships with Tribal Nations to support culturally sensitive and sustainable stewardship initiatives. She earned her Ph.D. in 2023 in ecological anthropology from the University of Georgia, where she received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Award for her collaborative study with Afro-descendent fishers and shellfish collectors confronting socio-ecological challenges.