Courtney Flint

Environment & Society / Ecology Center

Professor

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Biography

Dr. Courtney Flint is a community and natural resource sociologist and interdisciplinary environmental social scientist. Her work focuses on people’s perspectives and collective actions in changing landscapes and social and natural resource conditions, particularly regarding water hazards and management. She prioritizes providing sound data to support local and regional decisions on land use, natural resource management, and local and regional wellbeing.  In addition to her faculty role, she is the Associate Director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory. 

Dr. Flint’s PhD is in Rural Sociology from The Pennsylvania State University. She has a MS in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BS in Geography from Northern Arizona University. She previously served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Dept of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and in the Sociology Program at Utah State University. 

Research Interests

Over her career, Dr. Flint has worked closely with researchers from water science, civil and environmental engineering, forestry, biogeochemistry, plant phytochemistry, agricultural science and engineering, systems ecology, landscape planning, and other sciences as well as local leaders and representatives from government agencies. She sees working across disciplinary lines, as well as working with people beyond the scientific realm, is integral to addressing complex social-environmental changes.

Current projects include:

• Local water management organizations and risk-related decisions in the Great Salt Lake Basin, particularly irrigation companies and municipalities (NSF-funded I-GUIDE - Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment and the Utah Water Resources Laboratory)
• Geospatial research on aging dam vulnerability, particularly related to the interactional capacity of those managing dams and downstream critical infrastructure, communities, and protected areas (NSF-funded I-GUIDE - Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment)
• Research and engagement on compound water hazards, community wellbeing, sustainability transformations, and rural-urban connections in the Intermountain West as part of the NSF-funded Transformation Network (a Sustainable Regional Systems project)
• The Utah Wellbeing Project – a survey-based assessment of local wellbeing and perspectives across Utah cities and towns to inform local and regional planning processes.

Current Staff and Students

• Michael Englert – MS Student Environment & Society
• Bailey Holdaway – PhD Student Environment & Society
• Nicolas Holden – MS Student Environment & Society
• Allison Rafert - MS Student Environment & Society
• Sydnee Jensen - MS Student Environment & Society