In FY 16, more than 51 UGA students assisted the Fanning Institute in meeting our mission of strengthening communities and organizations through leadership development, training, and education. We are pleased to have doctoral student Tara Gancos Crawford as part of our team. Crawford is working toward a Ph.D. in Integrative Conservation and Forestry and Natural Resources.
Crawford works primarily in the field of natural resources management, focusing on developing analytical tools and collaborative processes that can facilitate decision making in contexts involving multiple stakeholders, tradeoffs between stakeholder objectives, and scientific uncertainty. For her dissertation, she is working with several state wildlife management agencies in the southeast to develop transparent and defensible frameworks for decision-making in the context of public alligator harvest programs.
At the Fanning Institute, Crawford is using her knowledge and experience to develop applied research studies to evaluate the impact of Fanning’s leadership development programs.
Her interests include wildlife ecology and management, conservation, decision analysis, statistics, public policy, community development, teaching, photography, and travel.