Center Chalk Talks: Katherine von Stackelberg, ScD

Our monthly Center Chalk Talks series (4th Wednesdays) is a chance for members and affiliates to showcase the exciting research they are working on and solicit collaboration. This month, Katherine von Stackelberg, ScD, director of research translation and senior research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health, will present on: “Biodiversity Metric to Support Decision-Making Following COP15”

Dr. von Stackelberg has long worked at the intersection of science and policy, originally in assessing public health and ecological risks of exposure to environmental contaminants, which expanded to include the role of natural systems, expressed as ecosystem services, in supporting well-being, and the subsequent valuation of those ecosystem services to support policy analyses. She is a Principal at NEK Associates LTD and a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she directs Research Translation for a large Superfund program grant. Her ScD dissertation was based on a contingent valuation survey to monetize the benefit associated with risk reductions to ecological receptors exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls in the environment. She is currently working with an international team to develop an ecosystem integrity index (EII; in review) expressed as carbon-weighted hectares, that combines earth observation, machine learning, and confirmatory ground-level data and links to a monetized (or tokenized) valuation of biodiversity attributes. Through this work, she attended the COP15 Convention on Biodiversity as part of the Estonian delegation. Dr. von Stackelberg teaches a course on “socio-ecological systems to support a regenerative future” that focuses on systems analysis, economic drivers of environmental degradation, and transformational systems approaches to support nature-positive decisions by individuals, companies, and governments. Dr. von Stackelberg served on US EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, and a National Academies panel on coral reef resilience. She serves as frequent peer reviewer to the European Commission Horizon funding program, and was a peer reviewer to the US EPA on several ecosystem service assessment documents. Dr. von Stackelberg received her ScD, ScM, and AB from Harvard University.

This event will be held via Zoom. It will be recorded and made available on our website.

For more information, email niehsctr@hsph.harvard.edu.

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