Kathleen E. Halvorsen

Natural Resource Policy

I have a joint appointment with the Department of Social Sciences and the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science. As part of the Environmental and Energy Policy Graduate Program, I teach SS5300 Environmental and Natural Resource Policy.

I currently have two main research foci: climate change mitigation and biodiversity protection. I am studying climate mitigation through energy conservation with a new NSF INFEWS grant focused on the United States and the Netherlands.  We have a new project establishing a network around socioecological impacts of Arctic permafrost losses entitled "Convergence NNA: Coordinate a Transdisciplinary Research Network to Identify Challenges of and Solutions to Permafrost Coastal Erosion and Its Socioecological Impacts in the Arctic."I also lead a large, international, transdisciplinary group of researchers studying the impacts of forest-related bioenergy across the Americas that is funded by, among other sources, NSF PIRE and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) CRN3 programs.  One dimension of this project is the study of impacts on biodiversity which is an area of research that I will increasingly focus on over the next few years.

I served on the 2010-11 National Academy of Science's Committee on the Economic and Environmental Impacts of Increasing Biofuels and you can download our report as a free pdf here.

My research projects and supervision of graduate students are very transdisciplinary. I have the pleasure of working with a wide variety of social, natural, and applied (engineering) scientists across Europe, China, and North and South America.  I have also taught about and studied the acquisition of transdisciplinary scientific teamwork skills.

On a more personal level, I love to spend time searching for cool rocks and mushrooms, hiking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, knitting, and spending time with my dogs.