Meet IonE Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Alum Diele Lobo
In 2024, we published a feature story on the Institute on the Environment’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program, highlighting our vision to reimagine the postdoctoral experience for early-career scientists and researchers. Since then, we’ve shared stories of the original postdocs who inspired this initiative. Today we’re featuring Diele Lobo, PhD, a recent alum of the program, pictured above.
Read the first article in the series.
Climate change adaptation – efforts to adjust to a warming planet and reduce its impacts – requires interdisciplinary collaboration. While research from the social, natural, and conservation sciences offers valuable guidance to build resilience, the knowledge that is often siloed among organizations creates a significant obstacle.
Diele Lobo, a conservation scientist interested in the human dimensions of conservation and natural resource management, set out to bridge this gap through her involvement in the project Assessment of Adaptation Plans and Practices for Natural and Cultural Resources in the Midwest.
Lobo, who goes by “Dee” informally, began her IonE postdoctoral fellowship in 2022, collaborating with experts at the University of Minnesota–hosted Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (MW CASC). As part of this work, she sought to understand the state of climate adaptation in the resource management and conservation sectors.
By synthesizing knowledge that is currently dispersed across scientific literature, agencies, and natural and cultural resource managers, her project team hoped to identify best practices to address action barriers and create useful insights to improve adaptation plans.
“Climate change, as we know, has already brought serious harm to people, nature and how we relate to the natural world – but if we can be better prepared, we can still prevent the worst,” says Lobo.
That means acting now to reduce risks, strengthening our capacity to cope and recognizing new opportunities. Adaptation planning can play a key role in making this happen.
Lobo is an advocate for centering broad participation and representation in science. While working on the MW CASC project, she conceptualized and pursued research grounded in stakeholder engagement, which produced actionable outcomes that were responsive to the needs of conservation practitioners.
“Dee doesn’t lose sight of the most important priority – which are the people and the relationships,” says IonE Director of Research & Knowledge Initiatives Melissa Kenney, who was one of Lobo’s fellowship mentors. “She grounds her work in systems of trust and respect, thinking deeply about what co-production partnership should look like.”
Being able to prioritize the needs and voices of practitioners – and thinking about what form information should take to be useful – has been a postdoctoral fellowship highlight, shares Lobo.
“IonE is a place where being interdisciplinary and bringing different kinds of knowledge is valued, encouraged, and supported – and that has really shaped my career,” she says. “I came in with one idea of what my career would look like, and I’m leaving with a completely different one after being exposed to new models of leadership, ways of doing research, and thinking about collaboration.”
Want to learn more about Lobo’s work? Attend her livestreamed seminar on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, at 3 p.m. CT, where she will present findings from Assessment of Adaptation Plans and Practices for Natural and Cultural Resources in the Midwest.
