Kelly Claborn

Kelly is a PhD candidate in Environmental Social Sciences, with a concentration in Complex Adaptive Systems Science.  Her broad research interests include governance and institutions, human behavior, decision-making, language use and communication, computational social science methods, the social impacts of environmental conservation, collective action, adaptation, and cultural evolution. Kelly's doctoral research explores the role of imprecise language in conservation, looking specifically at buzzwords and how they spread, are used, and impact decision-making and communication. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and utilizes a mixed methods approach, from a large-scale text analysis to a series of interviews to an experimental survey.

Prior to ASU,  Kelly earned her M.S. at The Ohio State University in Environmental Social Sciences and spent 4 years as a conservation data scientist on the Conservation Evidence team at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) before joining ASU. In her role at WWF, she spent most of her time exploring how to meaningfully incorporate evidence into decision making across the conservation sector.  From contributing to a long-term, quasi-experimental monitoring program examining the social and ecological impacts of marine protected areas in Eastern Indonesia, to the development of a decision support tool utilized by senior leadership across the WWF portfolio, Kelly has sought to follow a systems-based approach to conservation evidence generation and synthesis.  She now seeks to further cultivate the skills, knowledge, and relationships necessary to tackle the complex challenges of our time – and to help bring evidence into decision making at all scales, from individual behavior to the strategic planning of conservation interventions to informing global multilateral agreements and policy.