Nicole Ardoin, Emmett Family Faculty Scholar, is an associate professor in the Division of Social Sciences and a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is the Sykes Family E-IPER Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER).
Founder of the Stanford Social Ecology Lab, Professor Ardoin is an interdisciplinary social scientist who researches individual and collective environmental behavior as influenced by environmental learning and motivated by place-based connections. Professor Ardoin and members of her lab often work in collaboration with community partners, including public, private, and social sector organizations at a range of scales, to co-design and implement studies that build on a theoretical frame while concurrently addressing questions of interest to the partners. This work occurs primarily in informal settings, such as parks and protected areas, nature-based tourism locales, community gathering spaces, and other everyday-life settings.
Interested in actionable knowledge and notions of co-production, Professor Ardoin and her group collaborate with sustainability, environmental conservation, and philanthropic organizations to study the design, implementation, and effectiveness of a range of social-ecological practices. Through reflective learning, curiosity, and humility, the Social Ecology Lab strives to bring theoretically based insights to sustainability opportunities and challenges.