Sidra Aghababian
Sidra is a first year M.A. student studying Environmental Policy and Politics & Public Administration and Public Policy. She received her B.A. in Political Science and B.S. in Business Administration from Colorado State University in 2021. Throughout undergraduate, she utilized internships and work experiences to find an interest in Just Transitions and how the concept might be applied to local communities in Colorado. She hopes to continue her research on Just Transitions within Colorado and use that knowledge in the future to work for local Colorado governments. Sidra’s academic interests include Just Transitions, social justice, environmental justice, and community engagement. Outside of academics, she is an avid cyclist and had competed for 4 years in mountain biking for CSU Cycling.
Lynn Badia
Professor Badia teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and theory, focusing on topics related to the Environmental and Energy Humanities and the history and philosophy of science. Her courses consider issues such as climate, energy, environmental justice, ecology, and the Anthropocene from the perspective of the humanities. In 2015, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, as part of the Climate Histories Research Group at CRASSH Cambridge and the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research on the Environment initiative. Recently, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2017) and the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-2015) at the University of Alberta.
Professor Badia’s research is published by and forthcoming from Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Open Library of Humanities, Cultural Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Fordham University Press, Routledge, and West Virginia University Press. She is currently completing a monograph, Imagining Free Energy: Fantasies, Utopias, and Critiques of America, that introduces the concept of "free" or unlimited energy as a critical imaginary in American society since the beginning of the industrial era. Additionally, she is co-editing a book and a special issue of Resilience that share the title Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather, Climate, and Atmosphere.
Edward Barbier
Edward B. Barbier is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics, Colorado State University and a Senior Scholar in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. His main expertise is natural resource and development economics as well as the interface between economics and ecology. He has consulted for a variety of national, international and non-governmental agencies, including many UN organizations, the World Bank and the OECD. He has authored over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, written or edited 26 books, and published in popular journals. Barbier is a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and is a highly cited scholar on global environmental and sustainability issues. Professor Barbier’s latest book is The Water Paradox: Overcoming the Global Crisis in Water Management. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Jo Barbier
My research focuses on the role of environment and natural resources in sustainable economic development, especially developing countries. I have a special interest in forest land use, wildlife management, and environmental risk management. I have undertaken research on the role of international trade on natural resource use and environmental management, including trade in wildlife and forest products. My research interests also include designing policies to promote sustainable economic development, especially given critical global environmental challenges such as climate change, forest land conversion and biodiversity loss.
Michael Childers
Karissa Courtney
Karissa Courtney is a master's student in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology at Colorado State University based out of the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources (HDNR) Department. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology from Seattle Pacific University. At CSU, her master's thesis research addresses the inequities and disparities in wildfire risk mitigation work in Colorado. This work comes from the larger CoNIFER project, an NSF-supported wildfire risk mitigation project led by Dr. Tony Cheng and Dr. Jon Salerno from CSU and many others from collaborating institutions. Karissa is also a student representative for the HDNR Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee at CSU and a Fellow at the National Forest Foundation (NFF). Her work at the NFF focuses on diversifying who gets funded by the Foundation, and she also serves on their DEI Working Group.
Anders Fremstad
Anders Fremstad is an assistant professor in the Economics Department, where he teaches courses in microeconomics, environmental economics, and political economy. My research focuses on the political economy of the environment, especially the sharing economy and the climate crisis.
Heidi Hauserman
Human-environment interactions, globalization, development, and health are complexly interwoven with profound implications for humans and non-humans. The Department of Anthropology faculty seek to understand and facilitate students’ learning of these interactions.
“I see one of my jobs as unpacking the empirical complexity of the world, and troubling people’s assumptions about why things are the way they are,” explains Assistant Professor of Geography Heidi Hausermann. “We currently live in a world of enormous wealth disparity, in the U.S. and beyond, and such inequality has huge implications for the well-being of people and other living things. Sometimes – for various reasons – the underlying social and historical factors that shape inequality are hard to see.”
Anna Lavoie
Dr. Anna Lavoie is an assistant professor in the department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources. She is an interdisciplinary trained researcher specialized in environmental governance and livelihoods. She previously served at NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Fisheries Science Center where her work focused on women in Alaska fisheries, and development of social vulnerability indicators of Alaska fishing communities. She has also conducted research on the gendered dynamics and governance of small-scale fisheries in Brazil.
Wyatt Sassman
Professor Sassman teaches and researches in the areas of environmental law and litigation, environmental justice, and inequality. He co-directs the University of Denver Environmental Law Clinic. Before joining the University of Denver faculty, Professor Sassman taught as a fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, worked as an associate attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, and clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.