Announcing New Members for SCB North America Board
To those of you who voted in the SCB North America election – thank you! The votes are in, and we are excited to announce the following new members of the SCB North America Board, with terms beginning 1 July 2020:
Treasurer: Rebecca Hufft, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO
Dr. Hufft is the Associate Director of Applied Conservation at Denver Botanic Gardens, where she has overseen plant conservation projects since 2011. Prior to coming to the Gardens, she received her doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California Santa Cruz, conducted a
postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University, and served as a Senior Supervising Scientist at the National Ecological Observatory Network. She is a broadly trained conservation biologist whose research interests include restoration, ex situ conservation, long-term monitoring, and phenology. She is currently the co-chair for the North American Congress for Conservation Biology 2020 and has enjoyed helping to shape the meeting and engaging with more SCBNA members. She would like to continue to support the organization and its mission by serving on the board and contributing her many years of experience in grant and project management, research, education, and outreach.
Vice President for Policy & Programs: Erin Sexton, Flathead Biological Station, University of Montana, Polson, MT
Erin is a Senior Research Scientist with the Flathead Lake Biological Station, at the University of Montana. Erin’s research focus includes transboundary rivers between the US and Canada, with an emphasis on aquatic ecology and conservation biology, in our shared
transboundary watersheds, between British Columbia, Alberta and Montana. Erin is involved in coordinating cross-border research, assessment of mining impacts and ecological condition and the application of science to environmental decision-making. Erin lives in NW Montana with her family. They enjoy skiing, hiking, biking, playing on the river and gardening.
Member at Large: Paige Olmsted, Smart Prosperity Institute, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Paige is an environmental scientist whose research focuses how we account for, make decisions about, and value nature – from a personal as well as economic standpoint. At the Smart Prosperity Institute Paige leads a conservation finance initiative, examining financial mechanisms and enabling conditions to catalyze interest and investment to support ecosystem services and the natural world. Her expertise centers around ecosystem services, nature-based solutions for climate change, ecological economics, and environmental and relational values. With a common thread of connecting people and nature, her work has spanned rural agricultural settings in Latin America and South East Asia, to advocating for change in international policy settings, to providing sustainability guidance to private sector actors. In this work and past positions at the Earth Institute in New York City and UNEP in Geneva, she enjoys working with a range of stakeholders to address conservation challenges — including local communities, NGOs, various scales of government, academia, and the private sector. Paige maintains affiliations with the CHANS (Connecting Human and Natural Systems) Lab at UBC, and the Copenhagen Business School as part of the Impact for Innovation Lab. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC and a Master’s of Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University.