Dr. Karletta Chief is an Associate Professor and Associate Specialist in the Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. She is the Director of a National Science Foundation National Research Traineeship, “Indigenous Food, Energy & Water Security and Sovereignty.” Her research goal is to improve our understanding, tools, and predictions of watershed hydrology, unsaturated flow in arid environments, and how natural and human disturbances affect soil hydrology through the use of physically based methods. Dr. Chief’s research also focuses on how indigenous communities will be affected by climate change and collaborates in an interdisciplinary group of scientists including hydrologists, system dynamic modelers, and social scientists to determine how hydrological models can be improved to identify and mitigate risks to these vulnerable populations (nativeadaptation.arizona.edu).
Dr. Chief co-hosted an Indigenous Co-Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (Co-InFEWS) workshop in June 2020, and facilitated sessions like “COVID-19 and FEWS Challenges on The Navajo Nation.”
Dr. Chief is Diné originally from Black Mesa, AZ and received a B.S. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. As a National Science Foundation Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Chief received her Ph.D. in Hydrology and Water Resources in the School of Engineering at the University of Arizona (UA). She completed her post-doctorate at Desert Research Institute in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences in Las Vegas, NV where she worked on large weighing lysimeters at the Scaling Environmental Processes in Heterogeneous Arid Soils (SEPHAS) Project in Boulder City (sephas.dri.edu). Dr. Chief was named AISES Most Promising Scientist or Scholar (2011), Stanford University Distinguished Alumni Scholar award (2013), and Native American 40 under 40 (2015).