Hannah Brenkert-Smith
Hannah Brenkert-Smith is an environmental sociologist whose work examines social/environmental interactions in the face of environmental change, particularly in the American West. In the past ten years, Brenkert-Smith's work has focused primarily on household and community response to wildfire risk. In particular, this work has focused on risk mitigation decision-making and forest and wildfire hazard planning related to informal social interactions and sense of place. Her recent field work has two main areas of inquiry: seeking to understand social relationships shaping trust and coordination during extreme events and assessing long-term change on social and biophysical aspects of forest communities affected by major wildfire events. Hannah earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and holds a BA in women’s studies from University of Colorado and a MA in women’s studies from San Francisco State University.
Brenkert-Smith was an Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) fellow, a science and technology policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Climate Science and Applications Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.