Katherine Von Stackelberg, ScD

Katherine von Stackelberg specializes in developing risk-based tools and methods to support sustainable approaches to environmental decision-making. An emerging area of interest is in the exploration of approaches and tools for quantifying changes in ecosystem services, and identifying relationships between ecosystem services and expected benefits with the goal of integrating economics and risk assessment to better quantify the benefits of proposed risk reductions as a result of management or regulatory actions for use in cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, and value of information analyses. Much of her work has focused on incorporating quantitative uncertainty analysis (e.g., analytical, probabilistic, and fuzzy methods) into the environmental management process, and she has been at the forefront of the effort to explore methods for effectively communicating and interpreting scientific uncertainty to support environmental decision-making. Under a Phase I SBIR grant, she led the effort to develop a prototype Bayesian hierarchical model for predicting the potential for ecological effects associated with exposures to military unique compounds (e.g., smokes and obscurants, energetics) for which toxicity is poorly characterized and/or highly uncertain. She is currently participating in several projects related to the use of bioaccumulation models and outputs within decision support systems. She is an experienced modeler, and served as technical lead for the development of several aquatic food web models for the Corps and US EPA.

Dr. von Stackelberg serves as peer reviewer for numerous journals, and is on the editorial board for Risk Analysis. Dr. von Stackelberg serves on the US EPA Board of Scientific Counselors and is leading an effort to explore the use of decision analytic tools and methods to support environmental decision making within the Office of Research and Development, and is a member of the Scientific Advisors on Risk Assessment for the European Commission in Brussels. She also holds a non-teaching research affiliation with the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and serves as co-lead for the Research Translation Core of a Superfund Basic Research grant. Dr. von Stackelberg received an A.B. cum laude from Harvard College, and a Sc.M. and Sc.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health in Environmental Science and Risk Management.