Dr. Kirstin Dow is an Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Learning Center for Sustainable Futures, a green design residence and learning facility, at the University of South Carolina. She has diverse policy and research experience related to vulnerability, hazards and human dimensions of global environmental change. She is former Coordinator of the Risk and Vulnerability Programme across the internationally distributed centres of the Stockholm Environment Institute. Based in SEI's Main office in Stockholm, she was also the Manager of the Poverty and Vulnerability Programme.
Her long-term research addresses environmental hazards and the dynamics of vulnerability as broad social and environmental changes affect local decisions, capabilities and options for reducing hazard vulnerability. Her current research efforts focus on assessing the potential uses of climate information for vulnerability reduction and improved environmental management. Currently, she is a co-PI of the Carolina Integrated Science and Assessment Center, part of NOAA's Regional Integrated Science and Assessment (RISA) network, which works to bring climate information to decision makers. She has published on vulnerability to global environmental change, climate change adaptation, vulnerability of water systems to climate variability, response to hurricane hazards in the Southeastern US, urban ecology and environmental equity and justice. She is a contributing lead author to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment conditions and trends chapter, "Vulnerable People and Places." Her work also appears in such journals as the Natural Hazards Review, Environmental Hazards, Coastal Management, and Global Environmental Change,<;and the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, as well as numerous book chapters.