Caren Cooper

Caren is an Associate Professor of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. She is an advocate for participatory science practices, including public science, citizen science, and community science. Caren pursues scholarly inquiry into these areas with a lens of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). She is dedicated to training and mentoring students to become public scientists so they can pursue careers that weave science into the fabric of society. Her current projects use geospatial analytics to discern large-scale patterns across the natural and built environments to gain insights into the ecology, evolution and conservation of birds, as well as expose racial and economic inequities in environmental hazards and in the representativeness of environmental data itself. Caren develops public science programs that focus volunteer interests towards the generation of large-scale data to study and visualize the interactions between social and ecological systems. Her other interests include the ecosystem services of trees and public understanding of urban forests, for mitigation of air, light and noise pollution, flood risk and urban heat island effects. She is interested in any research question that can only be answered via citizen science.