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Erin Fried is MENV Lecturer and an Applied Social Scientist at The Â鶹ӰԺ Watershed Collective. She is an environmental qualitative scientist and educator, with roots in community engagement and facilitation. Passionate about landscape restoration and land management decisions informed by social and ecological dynamics for climate resilience, she designs and leads novel research and community engagement projects driven by participants telling their own stories and driving adaptive action. Community values and recommended actions surfaced through this work have informed private and public land management decisions regarding climate action and equity, forest restoration, nature-based solutions, and wildfire resilience.

Prior to joining The Â鶹ӰԺ Watershed Collective, she consulted on the Southern High Plains Initiative at The Nature Conservancy-Colorado. Through interviews with agriculturalists, she investigated the dominant drivers of land conversion and ownership decisions, framed within their personal and historic relationship with the landscape. Beyond landscape restoration, Erin also worked on a number of research projects with nonprofits and government agencies in education and behavior change in energy efficiency, sustainable materials, and water conservation.

Erin is dedicated to supporting students in building networks and developing their career interests. With a Master’s Degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at CU Â鶹ӰԺ focusing on biology education research, she applies the tenets of active learning and educational theory to her teaching and mentorship. She’s greatly enjoyed  teaching and mentoring the next generation of environmental and sustainability professionals over the past eight years in CU’s MENV Program, CU’s Environmental Studies Department (ENVS), Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department (EBIO), Front Range Community College, and through CU’s Learning Assistant Program.