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Devin Gill Brant
Lecturer; Research Associate
Environmental Policy and Planning
Cross-cutting
About
Devin Gill Brant, Ph.D., is an environmental social scientist interested in how people use knowledge to make decisions about climate change and environmental challenges. Her research focuses on making climate knowledge more useful and actionable, with particular attention to community engagement, participation, and the capacity of local communities and governments to respond to a changing climate. Her doctoral research at the University of Michigan examined how local practitioners interpret and use co-produced climate knowledge to make adaptation decisions in the Great Lakes region.
Devin brings more than a decade of experience working with communities, researchers, and practitioners on environmental issues. Her work has included stakeholder engagement around Great Lakes water quality and forecasting, invasive species management in West Virginia, and natural resource management and deforestation in Malawi. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability and B.A. degrees in History and Program in the Environment from the University of Michigan.
Publications
Gill, D., Jagannathan, K., Fujisaki-Manome, A., Field, V., Channell, K., & Lemos, M. C. (2024). Linking Boundary Organizations to Coproduce Actionable Knowledge: A Case Study of Ice Forecasting for Great Lakes Navigation. Weather, Climate, and Society, 16(4), 711-721.
Gill, D., Rowe M., and Joseph Joshi, S. (2018). Fishing in greener waters: Understanding the impact of harmful algal blooms on Lake Erie anglers and the potential for adoption of a forecast model. Journal of Environmental Management. 227: 248-255.
Lemos, M., Maillard, L., Herbert, N., Domingue, S. J., Jagannathan, K., Wong-Parodi, G., Goto, E. A., Gill, D., Van Berkel, D., Kalafatis, S., Jorns, J. L., Basaraba, A., & Harrison, T. (2025). Scaling up actionable climate knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 122(50), e2515771122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2515771122
Van Berkel, D., Estabrook, T., Fox, N., Bejarano, R. A., Maillard, L., Gill, D., ... & Lemos, M. C. (2023). PPGISr: An R package for Public Participatory GIS. SoftwareX, 101389.
Research
My research focuses on how people and communities use environmental and climate knowledge to make decisions. I am particularly interested in how research can be made more actionable by bringing together scientific knowledge, community experience, and the needs of decision-makers, and in how participation, institutional capacity, and decision-making contexts shape whether that knowledge is actually useful. My work has explored these questions through climate adaptation, environmental forecasting, and community engagement in the Great Lakes region, with an ongoing interest in how we can design more inclusive and effective approaches to producing and using knowledge about environmental change.
Education
Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability
B.A. in History and Program in the Environment from the University of Michigan.