Caren B. Cooper
About
Caren B. Cooper (she/her)
Professor, Forestry and Environmental Resources
Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence in Leadership in Public Science University Faculty Scholar | Center for Geospatial Analytics
I’m an advocate for participatory science practices, including public science, citizen science, and community science. I pursue scholarly inquiry into these areas with a lens of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). I’m dedicated to training and mentoring students to become public scientists so they can pursue careers that weave science into the fabric of society.
Contact Information
Office Address
3217 Jordan Addition
NC State University
Raleigh, NC
Email
cbcoope3@ncsu.edu
Research Interests
My current projects use geospatial analytics to discern large-scale patterns across the natural and built environments to gain insights into the ecology, evolution and conservation of birds, as well as expose racial and economic inequities in environmental quality and in the representativeness of environmental data itself. I carry out social science research to develop public science programs that engage participants in collective efforts to generate large-scale data to study, visualize, and change the interactions between social and ecological systems, including the built environment. My other interests include the ecosystem services of trees and public understanding of urban forests, for mitigation of air, light and noise pollution, sensor technologies, flood risk and urban heat island effects. Topics of interest to me include:
- design of participatory sciences
- ecology of lightscapes and soundscapes
- norms of data ethics for citizen science
- avian incubation behavior and physiology
- water quality monitoring
- human-wildlife management
- eggs as bioindicators of contaminants
and any research question that can only be answered via the participatory sciences.