Karen currently leads a number of grants with the ARC, DFAT and Palladium. Her ARC Future Fellowship, in partnership with local grassroots organisations, is exploring non-economic loss as a result of environmental change and identifying ways of working through this loss and grief in three Pacific Island countries. She has recently completed an ARC Linkage project that evaluated 32 community-based adaptation initiatives in 20 rural communities across Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Vanuatu, which identified four interdependent points for optimising future adaptation whereby initiatives are wholly led by local people and institutions. She is currently involved in two other ARC projects looking at transformative mobilities (Linkage) and everyday experiences of sea-level rise (Discovery). Karen has managed over 20 research grants as lead or named CI totalling over AU$3 million for the ARC, Australian Government, United Nations Development Programme, and others.
From 2008-2011, Karen was based in Cairns at James Cook University managing major research projects in the Wet Tropics rainforest and Torres Strait for the Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility and National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.
Karen proudly comes from the small town of Quirindi, which is Kamilaroi Country, on the Liverpool Plains in NSW. Growing up in a small, close-knit country town sparked Karen’s interest in social, development and environmental issues in rural communities.