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. Over the past fifteen years, her work has focused primarily on household and community response to wildfire risk. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, 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 current projects include efforts exploring emergent understandings of fire adaptation across stakeholders engaged in wildfire risk reduction activities; understanding conflicting understandings of pathways to forest resilience; and identifying social determinants shaping acceptability of fuel treatments on public lands. Brenkert-Smith earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was an Environmental Protection Agency science to achieve results 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.