Karen Carney is currently a AAAS Diplomacy Fellow working with the Forestry Team at the US Agency for international development. Karen is an ecosystem ecologist and conservation biologist whose research has addressed a wide variety of global environmental issues over the past decade, including global change, biodiversity conservation, and invasive species. She came to USAID from a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, where she studied the effects of global change on soil carbon cycling and storage. Prior to her fellowship at SERC, she received her PhD from Stanford University, where she examined how land-use change in the tropics affects soil microbial communities and the critical processes they govern in soil. Karen also has extensive conservation experience in various regions of the world, including coastal California, the humid tropical forests of Costa Rica, and Antarctica.