Global Environmental Change and Human Well-Being Skylar Hopkins
Assistant Professor, Applied Ecology
Skylar Hopkins joined NC State in August 2020 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Global Environmental Change and Human Well-Being. Hopkins, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Ecology, does research at the intersection of two fields: disease ecology and conservation biology. She explores how win-win solutions can be used to advance conservation goals while reducing human infectious disease burdens; how the impacts of parasites and pathogens on sensitive wildlife species can be mediated; and how the thousands of parasite species that might be threatened with extinction due to global change might be conserved. This work is often highly collaborative, involving other members of the Sustainable Health Ecology Lab and multiple interdisciplinary working groups. Together, they use a variety of methods, including field sampling, laboratory studies, mathematical modeling, and synthesis science, to design and evaluate conservation and health solutions.
Hopkins obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology and geology at the University of Maine at Farmington and her Ph.D. in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. She spent time as a postdoc at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Virginia Tech and Radford University.
