Lab Members

Kimberly Nicholas

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Photo credit:
Simon Charles Florian Rose

Dr. Kimberly Nicholas has published more than fifty articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and more. She has also been profiled in Elle and The Guardian, and gives appearances at around fifty lectures each year, such as the recent Climate Change Leadership summit in Porto.

Dr. Nicholas is associate professor of Sustainability Science at Lund, the highest-ranked university in Sweden. She is also Director of PhD Studies at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS). She has taught courses in the LUMES masters' program including Earth Systems Science, focused on climate science and solutions; Rural Systems and Sustainability; Quantitative Methods in Sustainability Science; and Writing for Change. She has mentored over 30 masters' students, as well as half a dozen PhD students and several postdocs.

Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. In her research, she studies the connections between people, land, and climate. Her goal is to understand how to manage land and resources to support a good life for everyone alive today, and leave a thriving planet for future generations.

Her current research projects include a collaboration with the Municipality of Lund to radically reduce climate pollution; The Takeoff of Staying on the Ground, investigating the flight-free movement in Sweden. She recently concluded a five-year investigation of sustainable agriculture in Europe, including the first comprehensive mapping of €61 billion of annual public spending under the Common Agricultural Policy.

Click here for more information, and my CV. See also personal profiles under the Press page.

LUMES reunion, October 2015: Nine of my former master's students, originally from eight countries, now living all over the world, back in Lund! Front row, left to right: Chia Sui Hsu (LUMES '11), Leila McElvenny ('12), Kim Nicholas, Rhianna Dean ('13), David O'Byrne ('11). Back row: Nadia Karami ('13), Thorhildur Haldorsdottir ('13), Klara Winkler ('14), Kyle Clark ('11), Verena Hermelingmeier ('14).

Current Lab Members

PhD Students

Sara Ullström
PhD at LUCSUS
"A Journey on the Ground: Rethinking aeromobile practices in the wake of climate change."
Interview with Sara
Part of the Formas "Takeoff of Staying on the Ground" project .

Alumni

Postdocs

Murray Scown joined the lab in November 2016, where he led analysis of spatial patterns and drivers of European farming systems and their social, economic, and environmental outcomes. He is now a postdoc studying river deltas under climate, land use, and population change scenarios at Utretch University in the Netherlands. Previously, Murray was a postdoc at the US Environmental Protection Agency after receiving his PhD from University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

Stefan Olin led the ecosystem modeling for several projects, including an analysis of zero-emissions landscapes supported by the Crafoord Foundation, and an interdisciplinary project examining tradeoffs for ecosystem services under future land use scenarios in Sweden. Stefan holds a PhD and a joint postdoc appointment in Physical Geography and Ecosystem Sciences at Lund University.

PhD and Licentiate Students

Altaaf Mechiche-Alami
PhD Candidate in Physical Geography (co-supervised with Jonathan Seaquist) in the Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of the Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability, LUCID
Dissertation: "“Food security in a changing climate: The role of cropland intensification and land acquisitions across Africa.”
Defended 9 June 2020.

Klara Winkler
PhD, Oldenburg University, Germany.
Co-supervised with Bernd Siebenhüner.
Dissertation: "Once more with feeling: Harnessing human-nature relationships for the governance of social-ecological systems." Defended 31 August 2018.
Now a postdoc at McGill University with Elena Bennett.

Emma Johansson
PhD in Physical Geography (co-supervised with Jonathan Seaquist).
Dissertation: “Large-Scale Land Acquisitions as a Driver of Socio-Environmental Change: From the Pixel to the Globe." Defended 14 September 2018. Currently a postdoc at LUCSUS.

Torsten Krause
With Lennart Olsson, I co-supervised the PhD dissertation of Torsten Krause in Sustainability Science through LUCID. Dissertation: “Buying Conservation: Financial incentives for tropical forest conservation in the Ecuadorian Amazon." Completed September 2013. Torsten is currently a lecturer at LUCSUS.

Finlay Molly MacGregor
Licentiate in Sustainability Science, September 2017 (co-supervised with Lennart Olsson).
Licentiate thesis: “Does voluntary governance work? Insights from specialty coffee.”
3-minute video application for Regarding Coffee Speciality Coffee Symposium.

Researcher

Heather Schoonover
Heather was part of the lab from September 2015- September 2017, following several years experience applying her masters in business administration as part of the sustainability team at Starbucks Coffee. She led the Wine exemplar within the OPERAs project, and co-coordinated the 12 exemplar case studies within OPERAs.