Dr. Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois

Chelsea L. Cervantes de Blois is the current Climate Security Analyst for the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues. She is a trained Human-Geospatial Geographer who works on climate change issues, since 2008. She recently received her PhD from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment, & Society with two specializations: (1) Geosciences (i.e., Remote Sensing, Cartography, Geographic Information Systems) and (2) Population Studies and is also an alumna from the Population Trainee Program at the Minnesota Population Center. Prior to her studies at University of Minnesota, Chelsea completed her MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia specializing in Transcaucasia and Eurasian development and regional languages, preceded by her BS in International Agriculture and Natural Resources from UW-Madison’s Soil Sciences and Agriculture and Applied Economics departments. Chelsea’s research focuses on the intersection of spatially modeling within human-environmental systems of data-sparse, Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Her passion for addressing challenges relating to climate change is evident from her extensive funding support and collaborations on scholarly publications; working as a Visiting Climate Change Researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia and Mexico; authoring World Bank reports on Climate Smart Agriculture in Mexico; collaborating with scientists from the U.S. and Russia on researching impacts of permafrost degradation on high latitude communities in Alaska and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Northwestern Siberia; consulting in Serbia and Kyrgyzstan on food security challenges; serving as a visiting agricultural researcher in Jordan for the German Federal Ministry and United Nation’s Sustainable Management of Available Water Resources with Innovative Technologies (SMART) project; and lastly, but most importantly, what started her passion for a climate-policy and finance initiatives was her experience working with Todd Stern’s Special Envoy for Climate Change team at the U.S. Department of State.