Katherine von Stackelberg specializes in developing risk-based tools and methods to support sustainable approaches to environmental decision-making. She is a Research Scientist at the Center for Health and the Global Environment and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, where she was Co-Leader of the Research Translation Core for a Superfund Research Program grant. In that capacity, she was responsible for developing outreach strategies and materials across diverse stakeholders to communicate the public health and policy implications of basic research related to exposure to mixtures of metals and neurodevelopmental health outcomes in children. She is also a part of the Biogeochemistry of Global Contaminants Sunderland Lab group. Much of her work has focused on incorporating quantitative uncertainty analysis (e.g., analytical, probabilistic, and fuzzy methods) into the environmental management process, and she has been at the forefront of the effort to explore methods for effectively communicating and interpreting uncertainty in scientific analyses to support environmental decision-making. Dr. von Stackelberg has managed and served as technical lead for several large US EPA and US Army Corps of Engineers projects focused on contaminated sediments. She is an experienced modeler, and served as technical lead for the development of several aquatic food web models used to support risk-based decision making for the Corps and US EPA, including FishRand, FishRand-Migration, and TrophicTrace. Dr. von Stackelberg is an advocate of decision analytic approaches for supporting decision-making by integrating environmental models, stakeholder preferences, and GIS-based data and modeling. She is involved in developing approaches to quantify changes in ecosystem services, and identifying relationships between ecosystem services and expected benefits with the goal of integrating economics and risk assessment to better quantify the benefits of proposed risk reductions as a result of management or regulatory actions for use in cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, and value of information analyses.
Dr. von Stackelberg serves as peer reviewer for numerous journals, and is on the editorial boards of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment and Risk Analysis and is area editor for ecological risk assessment at Risk Analysis. She served on the Board of Scientific Counselors on behalf of EPA for six years and was Chair for the last three. She served as Chair of the global and North America Science Committees for the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). She formerly served as Treasurer for the Society for Risk Analysis, and is a current Board member for the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. She is a member of the Scientific Advisors on Risk Assessment for the European Commission in Brussels. Dr. von Stackelberg received an A.B. cum laude from Harvard College, and a Sc.M. and Sc.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health in Environmental Science and Risk Management.