MSU Researcher and Faculty Member Named Associate Director of GRI

August 17, 2022

A Mississippi State faculty member with more than a decade of research and service in wildlife, fisheries, aquaculture and land conservation is adding an administrative role to her responsibilities.

Kristine Evans, an associate professor in the College of Forest Resources, is serving as the associate director for the Geosystems Research Institute. She was appointed to the role July 1, by Director of GRI, Robert Moorhead.

"Kristine has built important relationships with favorable leadership capabilities when she managed a southeast land conservation cooperative and served as PI over several research projects at GRI. With continued collaborations with GRI researchers, Dr. Evans has earned the reputation for her esteemed research processes and methodologies,"Moorhead said. "We're fortunate to have a scientist of her caliber assist in leading our team to meet MSU's mission as a land grant institution to help the people of Mississippi connect research and technology to on-the-ground application."

Since arriving at MSU as a graduate student in 2004, Evans has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and has received more than $11 million in funding from agencies and corporate entities including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The U.S.D.A. Agricultural Research Service, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and Weyerhaeuser Co.

In 2022, the National Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit honored Evans with the National Project Award for "Strategic Conservation Assessment of Gulf Coast Landscapes." Among other honors, she received MSU's 2022 Foil-Wyatt Outstanding New Faculty Advisor Award.

"One of my goals is to continue to build transdisciplinary research teams that use GRI technology to address research questions centered on climate change, the way pathogens move, agricultural land use, coastal resilience, and a range of other natural resource issues," Evans said. "These big issues often require big data and big computing capacity. MSU's high performance computing provides a breadth of opportunities for researchers to connect advanced technology with some of today's most pressing research questions."

Evans earned her bachelor's degree from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and her master's and doctoral degrees from Mississippi State University. She has extensive experience within wildlife conservation and also is a co-director of the Quantitative Ecology and Spatial Technologies (QuEST) lab in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at MSU. As Associate Director, Evans will help direct the Agriculture and Natural Resources program within GRI.

By Diane L. Godwin