Sam's research considers the multi-level negotiation of climate and resource transitions, paying attention to questions of scale, infrastructure, and boundary. He is interested in how transitions governance logics interact with evolving understandings of crisis under conditions of global environmental change. His work considers how conventions of growth, polity, and responsibility are implicated by such ideas of crisis. Trained as a planner and a Latin Americanist, comparative and global perspectives inform his work. His interests are interdisciplinary and multi-scalar across planning, law, and territorial transformation. Sam’s dissertation project explored the cross-scale politicking and negotiation that goes into the creative institutional work of trying to prospectively affect the development trajectories of territories of extended urbanization in Mexico--particularly territories embedded in trade, logistics, and agro-industrial systems--in the face of local-to-planetary resource pressures. His work yields both theoretical and practical contributions to an expanded understanding of planning practice in the Anthropocene. He lectures on globalization, development, and environment in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Sam's scholarly work has been published in Global Environmental Change, Urban Transformations, and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. Professionally, he has contributed to reports commissioned by CGIAR, UN Environment, the World Bank, and NATO. He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and dual master's degrees in Latin American Studies and Community & Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Brooklyn.