Kristina G. Douglass, Ph.D.

Dr. Douglass is an Associate Professor of Climate at the Columbia Climate School and a 2021 Carnegie Fellow. Prior to her appointment at Columbia, Douglass was the Joyce and Doug Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Penn State. She was also a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she was advised by Dr. Torrey Rick in Anthropology and Dr. Helen James in Vertebrate Zoology. She is currently a Smithsonian Research Associate and a member of the scientific steering committee at IHOPE. Douglass earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University and her AB in Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College. Trained as an anthropological archaeologist, her research program investigates questions of human-environment interaction in coastal and island regions, particularly in contexts of resource scarcity, decreasing biodiversity and climatic and environmental change.

One of Douglass’ primary research objectives is to reconstruct the historical ecology of regions where current policy debates are centered on the development of sustainable livelihoods for rural communities living in and around conservation and resource “hot spots”. Her work aims to build bridges between anthropology, conservation and development by providing policy makers, development agencies and conservation organizations with deeper time perspectives on human-environment-climate dynamics. She is particularly interested in developing new approaches to the study of human-environment dynamics that integrate theories and methods from anthropology, ecology, climate science and ethnohistory. Integral to her work is a commitment to inclusive research, co-produced with local, Indigenous and descendant community collaborators. To contact Dr. Douglass, email [email protected].