Karen Fisher-Vanden is Global Futures Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Her area of research primarily focuses on economy-wide and integrated modeling for climate change impact and adaptation analysis. The interactions between energy, water, and land systems are poorly understood, yet have important implications for food security, reliability of electric power supply, demographic patterns, risk and response behaviors, and the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure. Her work has required working on multidisciplinary teams and coupling a variety of tools including statistical tools, data products, and computational models.
She has led a number of large externally-funded research programs and is currently Director of the Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES), a large Cooperative Research Agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, Multi-sector Dynamics program.
She is currently a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)’s Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program, was a Lead Author of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report Working Group III, and a previous member of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Product Development Advisory Committee, and lead author of a congressionally-mandated CCSP report on global change scenarios. She served as President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) from 2023-2024 where she previously served on the Board of Directors, and was a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board on Economy-wide modeling.
Dr. Fisher-Vanden’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP), Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Nature Energy, Climatic Change, Energy Economics, and Land Economics.
She currently serves and has served on the editorial boards of Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), Energy Economics, and Journal of Global Economic Analysis (JGEA).