Dr. Laura Brewington is a Research Professor at the Arizona State University Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation and a Senior Global Futures Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Lab. She co-leads the Pacific Research on Island Solutions for Adaptation (RISA) program, where she designs and conducts collaborative, policy-oriented research to support climate adaptation in Hawaiʻi and the US-Affiliated Pacific Islands. She co-founded the Pacific Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (RISCC) management network and is a member of the Pacific Invasives Partnership, promoting a regional coordinated approach to international biosecurity and natural resources management. In 2023, she was appointed to the Invasive Species Advisory Committee (ISAC), which advises US Federal Government agencies on priority invasive species issues, both regionally and nationally.
She is also a Research Fellow at the East-West Center, a non-profit institution for public diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific region, where she leads the Pacific Islands Climate, Health, and Migration project. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill based on research in agriculture, invasive species, and conservation in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. Before joining the Pacific RISA team, she held a quarantine and biosecurity fellowship with WildAid, an international marine-conservation NGO, where she coordinated a comprehensive evaluation of the Galapagos quarantine chain. She also completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Center for Galapagos Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.