Jeni Cross

Jeni Cross, PhD, is Director of Co-Creation and Engagement at the Colorado Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine and Professor Emerita of Sociology. She conducts community-engaged research to build community capacity, accelerate systems change, and solve multi-faceted challenges. Her areas of expertise include behavior change, community development, collaborative decision-making, inter-disciplinary collaboration, and urban sustainability. Her applied research has been published in over two dozen different fields of science from sociology to civil engineering to nursing and ecology. She regularly consults with non-profits, schools, local government and businesses to design strategies for creating programs and organizational strategies that tackle public health, environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and social challenges. She regularly translates her research into blogs, videos, and white papers sharing social science insights for application in a variety of professional contexts. Her Ted talk on behavior change has been viewed over a million times and is being used in over a dozen college courses in sociology, environmental sustainability, public administration and entrepreneurship around the globe. She is the co-chair of the Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI), a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The EHMI address complex environmental problems as an interconnected, multi-sectoral, multi-faceted system, with a focus on the cumulative impacts from environmental stressors.