Evidence-Based Causal Chains for Linking Health, Development, and Conservation Actions.

Lydia Olander is a program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability at Duke University and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. She works on improving evidence-based policy and accelerating implementation of climate resilience, nature-based solutions, natural capital accounting, and environmental markets. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership and sits on Duke’s Climate Commitment action team. She recently spent two years with the Biden administration at the Council on Environmental Quality as Director of Nature based Resilience and before that spent five years on the Environmental Advisory Board for the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and widely published researcher. Prior to joining the Nicholas Institute, she spent a year as an AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working with Senator Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues. She was a college scholar at Cornell University and earned her Master of Forest Science from Yale University and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Liz Kalies is the Lead Renewable Energy Scientist for the North America region of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and an adjunct associate professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She is a terrestrial ecologist, with expertise in wildlife field ecology, restoration, and quantitative ecology. At TNC, she develops sound science to support the clean energy transition, particularly focused on renewable energy siting and design practices. She won the NC Sustainable Energy Association's Clean Energy Innovator of the Year Award in 2019 for her efforts to develop best management practices for wildlife conservation at solar facilities. She has a PhD in wildlife ecology from Northern Arizona University, a master’s degree in ecology from Yale University, and a BS in biology from Cornell University.

My interest in landscape ecology focuses on the agents and implications of pattern in forested landscapes. Increasingly, my research is in what has been termed "theoretical applied ecology," developing new analytic approaches to applications of immediate practical concern such as conservation planning. A hallmark of my Lab is the integration of field studies, spatial analysis, and simulation modeling in extrapolating our fine-scale empirical understanding of environmental issues to the larger space and time scales of management and policy.