Our People

Susan Cook-Patton

Senior Forest Restoration Scientist

Maryland

Susan Cook-Patton, Senior Forest Restoration Scientist at TNC.

Areas of Expertise

Reforestation, Forest Restoration, Natural Climate Solutions, Carbon Accounting, Ecosystem Function

Biography

Dr. Susan Cook-Patton is a Senior Forest Restoration Scientist on The Nature Conservancy’s Natural Climate Solutions Team.

She quantifies the climate mitigation potential of reforestation, agroforestry, and other natural climate solutions, and helps to infuse the best-available science into land management decisions. To do this, she collaborates with scientists across the globe, and from academic, government, and other non-governmental organizations.

Her work can be found in leading journals, such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, Science Advances, and Global Change Biology.

As an avid proponent of effective science communication, she often shares her research via multiple avenues—from LinkedIn posts to videos for grade school classrooms to public lectures to stories covered in major news outlets such as National Public Radio, the BBC and The Guardian.

Before joining the Nature Conservancy in 2016, she was a policy fellow at the US Forest Service and a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Susan holds a PhD in Community Ecology from Cornell University, and Bachelor degrees in Biology, Psychology and English from Indiana University.

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