Dr. Jonathan Gilligan (they/them) works in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations studying climate change in the context of socio-environmental and socio-ecological systems. Their research explores the effects of climate change on rural agricultural communities in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and how those communities can adapt to changing environmental conditions, with an emphasis on the role of population movements. Another area of their research examines how climate policy in the US can better incorporate knowledge from social and behavioral sciences and how non-governmental actors are undertaking roles traditionally associated with government regulation. Their skills include building interdisciplinary research teams, applying Bayesian methods in statistical and geospatial analysis, and applying agent-based simulation modeling to understanding the dynamics of socio-environmental systems. They are director of Vanderbilt University’s interdisciplinary Grand Challenge Initiative on Climate and Society and led the development of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major in climate studies. They have served on external advisory committees for several large transdisciplinary multi-institution projects on climate, water, and sustainability funded by NSF and the US Department of Energy (DOE) and on a team at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center that identified grand challenges to making socio-environmental simulation models more useful to planners and policymakers. Return to Who We Are