People
Forrest Fleischman
Forrest Fleischman is the leader of the Environmental Governance Group, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota.
Claudia Rodriguez Solorzano
Claudia Rodriguez Solorzano is a research scientist and adjunct faculty in the Department of Forest Resources.
Vijay Ramprasad
Vijay Ramprasad is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on governance for environmental sustainability and societal well-being in less-developed regions. To this end, his research aims to create usable science relating to livelihoods of farmers, sustainability of agro-ecosystems and forests, and adaptation to impacts of climate change. He holds a PhD in Geography and GIS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Cory Struthers
Cory received her PhD in Political Science at UC Davis, with emphases in comparative politics, methodology, and environmental policy, and her MA in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Cory’s research interests involve extending theories of comparative political institutions to distributive policymaking and representation, and understanding the drivers of bureaucratic behavior, including the use of science and evidence in decision-making. You can read more about her work at https://corystruthers.weebly.com/.
Adrienne Strubb
Adrienne is PhD candidate in Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota, currently serving as a NEPA specialist for the USDA Forest Service in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She previously worked her way through graduate school teaching policy courses, conducting natural resource stakeholder research, and line-cooking at a Texas brewery. She is interested in how decisions are made in the face of new information in the social landscape, using theoretical works from information-retrieval, science-usability, and the diffusion of innovation literature to ground her research. Contextualized by socio-environmental systems, her dissertation is pieced together through three lenses, exploring the capacity of public environmental agencies to act as knowledge brokers, to gauge the durability of science use in forest management plans in trying to incorporate more conservation initiatives, and to illuminate the social narrative of a contentious resource as higher institutions transition into new models of resource management. Ultimately, when trailing the application of science in socio-environmental decision-making, a deeper understanding of access to science illuminates social disparities in environmental governance. In other words, how are natural resources governed beyond our hegemonic echo-chambers? CV
Marissa Schmitz
Marissa Schmitz is a PhD student in Natural Resource Science and Management at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on understanding the political economy of forestry supply chains in Minnesota.
Kelsey Poljacik
Kelsey is a master's student in Natural Resource Science and Management at the University of Minnesota. Her research is focused on urban agriculture in the Twin Cities and environmental land use planning. Kelsey received her bachelor's degree in Natural Resources from Cornell University.