University of Nevada, Reno Assistant Professor in Political Science, Elizabeth Koebele, was recently awarded the 2020 Mousel-Feltner Award by the College of Liberal Arts for her research accomplishments in 2019. The Mousel-Feltner Award was established in 1993 to celebrate excellence in research and/or creative activity within a single calendar year and is generously funded by donors to the College.

Koebele’s research addresses key issues in the field of environmental policy, with a focus on water governance and disaster resilience policy. "I am particularly interested in how using more collaborative approaches to solving environmental problems can improve both policymaking processes and environmental outcomes," she said. Koebele's work takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and modeling the complex interactions between humans and their natural environment, which involves collaborating with hydrologists, public administration scholars, sustainability scientists and more, as well as working directly with policymakers and stakeholders.

In 2019, Koebele published a number of articles in highly-ranked scholarly journals, such as Global Environmental Change and Policy Studies Journal and was named as a co-principal investigator on research grants totaling over $6.5 million from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of p;Agriculture. These accomplishments were highlighted in a "Spotlight on Early-Career Researchers" interview with Koebele, published in Nature. "In 2019, the significance, quantity and quality of Koebele’s research was substantial, indeed extraordinary, and outstanding," according to Political Science Professor and Department Chair, Carolyn Warner. Last year, Koebele also became the first faculty member from the College of Liberal Arts to hold an affiliation with the graduate program of hydrologic sciences, where she mentors students and collaborates on research.

"I am extremely grateful to the College of Liberal Arts for their generous recognition of my research, as well as to my departmental colleagues and my research collaborators for their continuing support," Koebele said. In addition to continuing the research described above, Koebele was recently awarded funding to pursue new collaborative research on COVID-19 policy responses.