Chelsie Romulo
Professor, University of Northern Colorado
Email: Chelsie.Romulo@unco.edu
About Me
Chelsie Romulo is a professor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. Her research spans several resource management contexts, but consistently seeks to understand what works and why to explain what contextual characteristics result in impacts and outcomes. She uses mixed methods approaches to integrate quantitative and qualitative data that can be applied to many different management and policy situations and frequently make use of existing data in new contexts. A former SESYNC graduate student pursuit member and Smithsonian-Mason Doctoral Fellow in Conservation, her dissertation research focused on community-based natural resource management in the Peruvian Amazon. Her current research interests delve into evaluating enabling conditions for payments for ecosystem services programs using big data machine learning models and developing assessment methods for teaching environmental and sustainability concepts. She is currently PI of an NSF IUSE grant using machine learning techniques as an assessment tool to understand how students learn complex sustainability topics in the Food-Energy-Water-Nexus.
Focus of current FEW-Nexus-based education work
To better inform those who teach, make curricular decisions, and manage college-level environmental programs, my research lab is developing a tool for assessing environmental students' foundational knowledge and their ability to grasp complex systems-level concepts. Specifically, we apply an established machine learning method of evaluating constructed response (short answer) questions to create a Next Generation Concept Inventory (NGCI) in collaboration with the Automated Analysis of Constructed Response Lab at MSU. This new approach to concept inventory construction creates a new set of constructed-response items and associated automated scoring models for the commonly complex systems typically addressed in EPs. This work focuses on Food-Energy-Water Nexus systems as an initial pilot for NGCI development and is funded by a million dollar NSF IUSE grant (IUSE:EHR Award # 2013373). We are in the process of developing next steps and next grant proposals, so if you're interested in collaborating, please reach out!
FEW-Nexus-based education experience, expertise and interests
I'm one of the working group leads and excited to be part of a collaborative community effort working on FEW education contexts. My background is conservation biology and the field of conservation is inherently cross-disciplinary and collaborative as components of several knowledge domains (e.g., natural and social science) inform research, practice, and policy. Contemporary conservation research commonly involves viewing issues from an interdisciplinary and complex socio-ecological systems perspective, and many research endeavors benefit from teams of individuals with diverse skill sets. Building the appropriate research team requires consideration and evaluation of team needs and team member's skills and experience. Forming a detailed research question and agenda allows my teams to describe roles and then identify potential collaborators. As a member of several interdisciplinary collaborations, I stress the importance of fostering positive team dynamics and communication.