Lydia Olander's Bio and Research

Lydia Olander directs the Nicholas Institute’s program in ecosystem services. She has worked on a range of issues for the institute, including national energy, climate, and transportation policy; oil and energy security; clarifying new science relevant to climate change policy for decision makers; and water issues for a rapidly developing North Carolina. Currently she is developing the Institute’s and Duke’s expanding initiative on ecosystem services; coordinating Duke’s Ecosystem Services Working Group; coordinating the development of a National Ecosystem Services Partnership; helping to coordinate the Institute’s programs on greenhouse gas offsets; directing the Technical Working Group on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases; and, when time permits, working on the burgeoning multinational effort on reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).

Lydia joined the Nicholas Institute after spending a year as a AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working with Sen. Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues. Before moving to Washington, D.C., she was a researcher with the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s department of global ecology, where she studied the biogeochemical impacts of logging in the Brazilian Amazon and worked with new techniques to extrapolate impacts regionally using remote sensing. She received her doctorate from Stanford University, where she studied nutrient cycling in tropical forests, and has a masters in forest science from Yale University. She has published in professional journals, including Ecosystems, Biogeochemistry, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, Forest Ecology and Management, Earth Interactions, and Environmental Research Letters.