Dara Wald

Dara Wald is an associate professor of environmental policy in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech University, where she is affiliated with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, the Global Change Center and the Invasive Species Collaborative. She is a Fellow in VT’s Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation. Her research combines theory from psychology and policy to examine how trust, values, and power emerge, differ among audiences, and shape communication, collaborative processes, and policy outcomes in polarized agri-environmental contexts.

Her research has been published in scholarly journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the Journal of Environmental Management and Conservation Science and Practice. Her book with Anna L. Peterson, Cats and Conservationists: The Debate over Who Owns the Outdoors (Purdue University Press, 2020), examined how science and competing values shapes debate over contentious environmental issues. Wald received the 2022 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and was awarded a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for her project entitled, “The Polarization of Science, Source Credibility, and the Public Good.” She is currently writing a book on public skepticism about technoscientific credibility in environmental policy. Wald is Chair of the International Environmental Communication Association and an editorial board member for the Review of General Psychology.

Prior to joining VT, she co-led the Science Communications Lab at Texas A&M University and was a Fellow in the Institute for Science Technology and Public Policy in the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Wald was also an assistant professor at Iowa State University, where she led the Science Communication Project. She received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and her PhD from the University of Florida.

Wald specializes in:

• Environmental Policy
• Science, Risk and Environmental Communication
• Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management
• Collaborative Governance of Natural Resources