Dr. Carrie Kappel
Project Director and Facilitator
Dr. Carrie Kappel is a skilled facilitator and research scientist with nearly twenty years of experience participating in, leading, and facilitating collaborative teams at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, with LegacyWorks Group, and beyond. Carrie helps organizations and teams to design and facilitate engaging and participatory processes that enable strategic thinking in the face of complexity and uncertainty, support learning, deepen trust and strengthen relationships, foster creativity and productivity, build capacity for shared leadership, and model best practices for collaboration.
Carrie has supported local, national, and international nonprofits, government agencies, research teams, and public-private partnerships. Her approach draws upon her research background, integrating knowledge across diverse disciplines and ways of knowing, and her training and deep experience facilitating and leading collaborative teams. Carrie brings a unique mix of technical, interpersonal, listening, and visual skills to bear in helping foster the emergence of new insights and paths forward. In addition to her deep hands-on experience with collaborative teams, Carrie has professional training in facilitation and graphic recording from The Grove Consultants, Liberating Structures, and Kelvy Bird’s Visual Practice Workshop. Systems thinking is an integral part of her practice.
Carrie is a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara and a past science advisor for the Science for Nature and People Partnership. Her research focused on the dynamics of marine and coastal social-ecological systems and the development of science-based tools to support more holistic decision making. Prior to beginning her research career, Carrie was an environmental educator for both Teton Science Schools and Ogden Nature Center. She has served on the boards of Ecology Project International, Teton Science Schools., and Wilderness Youth Project. She holds a B.S. in Biology with Honors from Brown University (1995) and a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University (2006).
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