Caren Cooper

Caren Cooper, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University in the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program in Leadership in Public Science, jointly appointed as Assistant Head of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. She is author of Citizen Science: How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery (The Overlook Press, Dec 2016). Cooper is a blogger with SciStarter, syndicated to Discover Magazine (Citizen Science Salon) and the PLOS Blogging Network (Citizen Sci), and guest blogger at Scientific American. Cooper is founder and moderator of #CitSciChat, a Twitter discussion about citizen science, and @IamCitSci, an account with weekly rotating hosts. She can be followed on Twitter @CoopSciScoop. Cooper is an advisor for the Crowd & the Cloud, a public television mini-series about citizen science to air in early 2017. Cooper was involved in the formation of the Citizen Science Association, co-chairs the ethics working group, and led the committee to create a new journal, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. She is a co-editor-in-chief for the CSA’s journal. She is subject editor for the Journal of Avian Biology. She is co-chair of the CODATA-WDS Task Group on Citizen Science and the Validation, Curation, and Management of Crowdsourced Data. She is director of research partnerships with SciStarter.com, the largest searchable repository of citizen science projects. Cooper is a Senior Fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program with a focus on science communication.
Cooper helped design citizen science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology including My Yard Counts, YardMap, NestWatch, Celebrate Urban Birds, and the House Sparrow Project. Cooper has over 50 publications, including research papers that relied on data from NestWatch, Project FeederWatch, Christmas Bird Count, Breeding Bird Survey, and My Yard Counts. Cooper also collaborates with social scientists to study birdwatchers and citizen scientists to understand land stewardship and conservation behaviors, as well as the societal implications of participatory research.

Contact Information: [email protected]; 919.707.9273