Caitlyn Sears (she/her) is a postdoctoral associate with the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University and is affiliated with the Department of Global Development. Her work combines economic and development geography to focus on and analyze south-south relationships of trade, cooperation and regulation, and how they shape and reinforce axes of uneven development. 

Sears earned her PhD in geography from the University at Buffalo, where she also taught several courses—one of which she designed and taught in Singapore, at the Singapore Institute of Management–University at Buffalo campus. She has also assisted and co-led two study abroad programs in Hong Kong and Singapore.

She was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences fellowship for her work on the Malaysian pesticide industry and its role in global agrochemical production networks. Before coming to Cornell she was affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington where she conducted her NSF research. She is part of a growing group of scholars and activists, Pesticide Research Network, working together to explore the geography of global pesticide production, trade, use and regulation and how these changes affect ecologies and human health.

At SEAP, Sears will continue her critical social science research related to chemical geographies; in particular, developing a comparative case study that examines the interactions between national and global level regulations for pesticides. She hopes to work closely with faculty and students in the program and the wider Cornell community during her time here.