ENP is proud to welcome our new associate professor Myanna Lahsen

Myanna grew up in Denmark and France and obtained her Bachelor degree in literature and anthropology at Michigan University and her PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University, enjoying  honors distinctions and numerous, multi-year awards, including the Jacob Javitz and EPA ”STAR” fellowships. Since her PhD fieldwork spent among environmental scientists, she has pursued a strongly interdisciplinary path while enjoying postdoctoral positions at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and the JF Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. At Harvard, she was also Lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy before moving to Brazil, where she went to study the geopolitics of climate science and eventually became Senior Associate Researcher in the Earth System Science Center of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

Since the inception of both journals, Myanna is advisor to Nature Climate Change and Executive Editor with WIREs Climate Change, responsible for the domain dedicated to The Social Status of Climate Knowledge. In 2016, she also became Executive Editor with Environment Magazine (Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development). In addition, she has served on review and advisory panels at the U.S. National Science Foundation and as advisor to the United Nations on science-policy interface and global sustainability issues. She has also been a participant in the organization of environmental science internationally, serving as Social Science Officer with the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme from 2007-2009, as Young Scientist panel member in the “Visioning”process resulting in the creation of the research programme Future Earth (www.futureearth.org) and as convener of Future Earth’s Early Career Scientists Conference on Integrated Science in Vigoni Italy in 2014 (http://www.icsu.org/news-centre/news/top-news/young-scientists-met-to-debate-future-of-the-green-economy). In this capacity, she was in charge of selecting the scientific content and senior invitees to stimulate new research ideas and new collaborative networks among early career scientists selected from around the world to collaborate on the topics related to Ecosystem health, Human Wellbeing and a Green Economy. 

Continuing to explore the dynamics of climate change policy in the United States and Brazil, her current research has multiple strands. One line probes the impacts of soy and meat production in Brazil and how Brazilian communications media cover these impacts in the context of climate change. Another explores sociological patterns reflected in climate policy-related activities and preferences among Brazilian multi-sector actors and stakeholders, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including policy network analysis. A third line of her research aims to direct science policy such that it is more capable of responding to the sustainability challenges of the 21st Century.