Jordan Kern

Jordan Kern joined NC State in August 2018 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Global Environmental Change and Human Well-Being. Kern, an assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, studies dynamic natural-human systems in order to improve understanding of new risks to people and the environment across sectors (e.g., food-energy-water) and scales (e.g., from individual watersheds to the entire west coast of the U.S.), and to develop novel approaches for mitigating these vulnerabilities. His research is broadly focused and interdisciplinary, bridging electric power systems and water resource systems analysis, finance/economics and environmental science. He uses computational modeling, operations research and a wide range of analytical and statistical tools to capture key interactions at the nexus of these areas, and provide assessments of physical, environmental and financial risk.

Kern obtained his bachelor’s degree in environmental science, and master’s degree and Ph.D. in environmental sciences and engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before graduate school, he worked as a consultant for the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Kern joined NC State after serving as a research assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has published on a range of topics in energy, water and the environment; been an invited speaker at national science meetings; and collaborated extensively with public and private stakeholders. He has served as a principal investigator on multiple large, inter-institutional, and interdisciplinary proposals, including two National Science Foundation Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems proposals.