Treasurer
She/her
Sanae is a settler aloha ʻāina originally from Cahuilla homelands (Jurupa Valley, CA) and now living in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. As a woman of Japanese and Euro-American descent who has trained in political and social science, bioremediation, geography, and Hawaiian research methods, she works to build community capacity to remediate environmental pollution across Hawaiʻi and beyond.
About Sanae
Sanae’s commitment to implementing community-scale bioremediation began while completing her undergraduate and graduate education at Cal Poly Humboldt (Wiyot homelands). There, she studied political systems, actors, institutions, and their impacts across scales. She built on this knowledge during her MA program centered on environment and community. During this time, she bridged community and university partnerships to conduct participatory action research focused on the assessment, documentation, and advancement of mycofiltration in Goudi’ni (Wiyot placename for Arcata). Sanae is now a PhD candidate in the geography department at Penn State University (Susquehannock homelands). In this capacity, her forthcoming dissertation project aims to collaboratively map the moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) of the Red Hill Crisis to reveal existing and expanded possibilities for past, present, and future remediation of the contaminated groundwater at Kapūkakī (Hawaiian placename for Red Hill).