Our Team
Members from the Field working from home
and beyond to bring the collection together
Jacob Campbell
Environmental Anthropologist
Project Co-Lead
Jacob Campbell is an Environmental Anthropologist with the Keller Science Action Center, where he leads the social science team for the Chicago region, and Adjunct Curator of Anthropology in the Negaunee Integrated Research Center. His applied research, pedagogy, and partnership building has focused on cultural connections to the natural world in urban and peri-urban areas. He works collaboratively across Chicago to create more equitable city institutions and green spaces that help communities thrive. He specializes in participatory research that informs decision-making about biodiversity conservation, community-centered land management, and public space design. Along with museum colleagues, Jacob established and sustains the Roots & Routes initiative with the Chicago Park District and a network of community leaders, artists, and organizations. In Pembroke Township, he co-leads a multidisciplinary museum team that conducts research and supports planning with local landowners, regional agencies, and conservation stakeholders.
Lily Coady
Lily Coady is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology, with a minor in Design and Spanish. She joined the Pandemic Collections team through her freshman year anthropology professor, Deborah Thomas, after editing a video and creating a website for the class.
Lily now continues to work on site design for this project, as well as a research project studying the Mumbai Coastal Roads project.
Undergraduate Intern
Digital Curation
Ana Croegaert
Director of Research
Sociocultural Anthropologist, Chicago Region
Ana Croegaert is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work is at the nexus of urban ethnography, gender, and social theory. In addition to the Pandemic Collection's Director of Research (2022), her projects have included sustained work on the Bosnia/Chicago refugee corridor and more recent work on curation and the role of plants and artistic practices in shifting understandings of trauma, resilience, and well-being. Ana is the author of Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies (2020), and her research interests include ritual, food, memorial, refugee migration, gender, and political economy. She enjoys the Pandemic Collection team’s collaborative approach to research and curation.
Cathy Hamilton
Research Assistant, Ethnographer, Digital Curations Team
Cathy earned her Bachelors degree in Anthropology and Psychology in 2016, and immediately after spent time living and working in Prague, Czech Republic. She moved back to the Chicago area in 2019 to attend DePaul University, where she recently graduated with a Master's degree in International Public Service. Her research interests include - Indigenous rights, policy and advocacy, and museums and place-making. She has been interning at the Field museum since March 2021.
Much of the work she has done on the pandemic collection has been centered on research and the conducting of interviews with members from our Chicago community and beyond. Her research focus for this project has been on the social determinants of COVID-19 health experiences, as well as cultural and community resiliency. Alongside the research and interviews, she has been working on the digital curation and website building aspect of the project - compiling other members' photos and data to chronicle the experiences that have been shared with each of them.
Chris Jarrett
Environmental Social Scientist, PhD in Anthropology
Project Coordinator Andes Amazon
Chris is a cultural anthropologist and Environmental Social Scientist in the Andes-Amazon Program in the Keller Science Action Center. He works on a variety of initiatives, including rapid biological and social inventories and the Putumayo Biocultural Corridor. His involvement in this project has been focused on collecting and organizing digital materials related to experiences of the pandemic in the Amazon, as well as interviewing partners and building relationships with mutual support groups such as the Comando Matico in Peru.
Jamie Kelly
Anthropology Collections Manager
Project Coordinator Philippines
Jamie Kelly is an Anthropology collections manager for Science and Education at The Field Museum. He is responsible for caring for cultural collections from Asia, Europe, and ancient Africa. Jamie has done field archaeology in the Midwest and in Brazil. As an undergraduate Jamie majored in Anthropology and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. In 2002, he completed a graduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with certification in Museum Studies at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Before joining The Field Museum in 2006, Jamie was a conservation assistant at the Milwaukee Public Museum and a museum registrar at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and at the Wheaton Historic Preservation Council in Wheaton, Illinois.
Mario Longoni
Urban Anthropology Manager, Keller Science Action Center
Data Manager & Project Liaison
Mario has spent over 21 years at the Field Museum working with communities, schools, and colleagues to research, document, celebrate, and build on the Chicago region’s cultural diversity as assets for meeting our contemporary challenges. From interviewing mothers in public housing on their community based childcare strategies to, most recently, collaboratively curating traveling exhibits on the diverse blue collar heritage of the Calumet region, he strives to work with the marginalized to gain them both recognition and opportunities. He is heartened to be part of creating the pandemic collection that preserves the stories and objects that highlight our region’s persistence and strength in the face of the loss, disruptions, and social change driven by COVID-19.
Amy Leia McLachlan
Sociocultural Anthropologist
Pandemic Collections Collaborator (Amazon)
Amy Leia McLachlan is a sociocultural and environmental anthropologist whose work considers the ethics, politics, and transformative potential of relations to and through plant life. Her research since 2006 with Uitoto communities of the Colombian Amazon has traced the history of extractive botanical economies as vectors of radically conflicting dreams about livable futures. She has apprenticed with Uitoto rainforest gardeners and traditional plant healers, and documented the transformation of Uitoto plant knowledge in contexts of environmental harm, urbanization, and forced displacement. Her research interests include gender and kinship, magic and curing, trauma and translation, and politics of the sensory. Amy is currently a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in Global Studies at the University of Chicago, and a collaborator on the Pandemic Collections project.
Madeleine Tudor
Sr. Environmental Social Scientist
Madeleine Tudor is an applied urban anthropologist in the Keller Science Action Center at the Field Museum. Her research has focused on the relationship between people, place, and landscape. She is passionate about bringing the vast resources of museums like the Field to broader publics— through community-based exhibitions, ethnographic research, programs and convenings—to showcase and amplify untold stories of resilience and diverse lived experience. During her 25 years at the Field, she has co-curated a number of collaborative exhibits, engaged a wide range of stakeholders to form regional networks, and developed a variety of interpretive media projects. She has enjoyed coordinating the development of this website as part of the Pandemic Collections team.
Alaka Wali
Curator Emeritus of North American Anthropology
Project Co-Lead
Alaka Wali is curator of North American Anthropology in the Science and Education Division of the Field Museum. She was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995- 2010. During that time, she pioneered the development of participatory social science research and community engagement processes based in museum science. She curates the North American collection and works closely with colleagues in the Keller Science Action Center to implement environmental conservation programs in both Chicago and the Amazon regions of Peru. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and the capacity for social resilience. She is leading the curation of the renovation of the North American Anthropology Hall, expected to open in May 2022.
