Professor Katrina Brown
Kate is Emerita Professor of Social Science and is active in research and writing on environmental change, inequality and resilience, and as an advisor to international scientific organisations and programmes.
Kate is an interdisciplinary social scientist specialising in environmental change, vulnerability and resilience. Her research is concerned with how individuals and societies understand and respond to change, and their different capacities for adaptation and transformation. She has innovated in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on sustainability and has led collaborative and international research teams to examine the interactions between environmental change, poverty and policy in many parts of the world. She is Editor in Chief of the journal Ecology and Society, and chair of Board of Trustees of S.A.F.E. Kenya.
Kate is a world-leading social scientist working at the interface of international development, environmental change and sustainability. She has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary research, working with collaborators across social, ecological, and human sciences and with arts and humanities scholars and creative practitioners. Her book, Resilience, Development and Global Changeresulted from an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, Resilient Development in Social Ecological Systems, and presents a re-visioning of resilience for development. She has advised international research programmes, such as IHDP, the ARC Centre for Excellence on Coral Reefs and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Her record of support for early career research is exemplary, she has initiated and directed Masters level courses (East Anglia and Exeter), led and participated in Summer Schools, and supervised 35 PhDs to completion. In 2013 she won the first ‘AXA Outlook’ award for pioneering work in Kenya on resilience and poverty using Forum Theatre, which was the subject of a National Geographic film in 2014. In 2018 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Wageningen, Netherlands, in recognition of ‘outstanding contributions to environmental social science, in the fields of political ecology, conservation and resilience’. She was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2018, and was a member of the GCRF Strategic Advisory Group from 2016-2020. She has chaired the Scientific Management Committee of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies since 2015. She is identified as one of the most influential cross-disciplinary scientists in ISI Highly Cited Researchers lists (2020,2021,2022).
Kate’s pronouns are she/her.
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