Dr. Shubhechchha Sharma (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Climate Resilience at IonE. She works with Dr. Melissa Kenney on (1) the NOAA project titled, “Diagnose Understandability, Interpretation and Use Challenges and Develop Prototype Improved Solutions for the Climate Prediction Center’s Drought and U.S. Hazards Outlooks”; (2) NOAA Cooperative Institute on Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) project titled “CIROH: Empaneled focus groups to determine how end users respond to visual cues of forecast products.”

Dr. Sharma is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in resilience to climate shocks. She is a member of the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars (RAYS) and a founding member of the Ostrom Center for the Advance Study in Natural Resource Governance (OCeAN). She earned her doctoral degree in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. Dr. Sharma also has a graduate specialization in Sustainable Food and Farming Systems; and a graduate certificate in Environmental and Social Systems Modeling. She attempted to “Identify Leverage Points to Create Resilience to Climate Shocks in Dryland Social-Ecological Systems” for her dissertation. She used social-ecological resilience theory with a multi-method approach to address current and future climate shocks by combining the qualitative method (focus groups and in-depth interviews), quantitative method (structural equation modeling), and System Dynamics Modeling (SDM). Her main areas of interest are drought, climate change, and food systems, but her approach applies to various contexts and stakeholders. 

As a graduate student, she taught undergraduate students about sustainability and research methods while working in various research capacities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Before doing her Ph.D. in the U.S., Dr. Sharma worked for seven years in South and South-East Asia in reducing carbon emissions, conserving biodiversity, and eradicating poverty while affiliated with the Toyota Foundation and WWF. She graduated from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand with a Master’s degree in Natural Resources Management. 

As a resilience scholar, she is motivated by her ability to work with communities impacted by climate shocks. She enjoys hiking, gardening indoors, or watching old classic films.