Dr. Courtney Flint

Environment & Society / Ecology Center

Professor

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Biography

Dr. Courtney Flint is a community and natural resource sociologist and interdisciplinary environmental social scientist. Her work focuses on people’s perspectives and collective actions in changing landscapes and social and natural resource conditions. She prioritizes providing sound data to support local and regional decisions on land use, natural resource management, and local and regional wellbeing.  

Dr. Flint’s PhD is in Rural Sociology from The Pennsylvania State University. She has a MS in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BS in Geography from Northern Arizona University. She previously served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Dept of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and in the Sociology Program at Utah State University. 

Research Interests

Over her career, Dr. Flint has worked closely with researchers from water science, civil and environmental engineering, forestry, biogeochemistry, plant phytochemistry, agricultural science and engineering, systems ecology, landscape planning, and other sciences as well as local leaders and representatives from government agencies. She sees working across disciplinary lines, as well as working with people beyond the scientific realm, is integral to addressing complex social-environmental changes.  

Current projects include:

• The Utah Wellbeing Project - an assessment of local wellbeing and perspectives across Utah cities to inform local and regional planning processes;  
• Research and engagement on community wellbeing, sustainability transformations, and rural-urban connections in the Intermountain West as part of the NSF-funded Transformation Network (a Sustainable Regional Systems project), with particular current focus on the Yakima River Basin in Washington; 
• Geospatial research on aging dam vulnerability, particularly related to the interactional capacity of those managing dams, critical infrastructure, communities, and protected areas (NSF-funded I-GUIDE - Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment) 
• Local water management organizations and risk-related decisions in the Great Salt Lake Basin, particularly irrigation companies and municipalities (NSF-funded I-GUIDE - Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment) 

Staff and Students

• Emma Epperson – MS Environment & Society 
• Michael Englert- MS Environment & Society
• Bailey Holdaway –MS Environment & Society 
• Alex Theophilus – MS Sociology 
• Sarah Wilson – MS Environment & Society 2023 
• Madison Fjeldsted Thompson – BS Environmental Studies 
• Kaden Peterson – Environmental Studies and Applied Economics 
• Patrick Gee – BS Environmental Studies & Russian 
• Nicolas Holden – BS Mathematics & Statistics 
• Haley Munson – BS Wildlife Ecology and Management 
• Bekah Richey – BS Psychology 
• Makenzy Whittekind – BS Rangeland Ecology and Management 
• Anna Durrans – BS Environmental Studies 
• Chloe Francis – BS Conservation and Restoration Ecology