Irit Altman Appointed as Research Assistant Professor in Biology

Irit Altman, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, has been appointed as a Research Assistant Professor in Boston University’s Department of Biology.

Prof. Altman is an ecologist and conservation scientist with extensive experience integrating ecological information into complex system models to understand ecosystem scale consequences of natural resource management and policy decisions. She received a PhD from the University of New Hampshire where her research focused on studying effects of anthropogenic disturbance on ecological relationships in salt marsh habitats, especially between parasites hosts.

At the Pardee Center, she and Prof. Les Kaufman lead an interdisciplinary research team on the coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) project, which seeks to understand, through comparative analysis, what impacts human interventions in natural systems (e.g., river diversions in dam construction, land conversions from forest to agriculture, extraction of energy resources, etc.) have had on those systems and the people who depend on them.