Kristina earned her PhD in the Environmental Social Sciences specialization area, and is a member of the Environmental and Social Sustainability Lab, working on land and wildlife conservation. She holds a BA in political science, and an MS in environmental social science. Kristina focuses on decision making under risk, and how this impacts policies related to fisheries and wildlife conservation, and is particularly interested in carnivore conservation on privately-owned landscapes.
Kristina’s work includes psychological modeling of policy support, examining the links between emotion, risk, and policy attitudes through various public surveys. She has experimentally tested the influence of communication efforts on tolerance for black bears, and summarized case studies of wildlife management and the implications for agencies. Additionally, she has investigated rural landowner preferences for land conservation programs, as well as the influence of information processing behaviors on the risk judgments of residents in a degraded, urbanizing watershed. Recently, in addition to conservation research, she spent three years of her postdoc managing the Environmental and Social Sustainability Lab, primarily working with campus partners to administer the Campus Sustainability Survey, as well as lab partners to administer the Environmental Social Science Research Experience Program. She is currently a Research Associate in the Terrestrial Wildlife Ecology Lab focused on agency data collection methods and land conservation.