Ardoin wins Everhart Award for work on environmental learning and sustainability practices
The William C. Everhart Award was presented to Fellow Nicole M. Ardoin for recognition of sustained achievements that illuminate, provide creative insights, and that foster an appreciation of our natural and cultural heritage.
The Award is named in appreciation of the distinguished career of Bill Everhart as field interpreter, researcher, administrator, author, and creator of the National Park Service's Harpers Ferry Center for creative design and communication, which has received national and international recognition for excellence. The Award recognizes sustained achievements during a career or in a specific episode that illuminate, provide creative insights to, and that foster an appreciation of our natural and cultural heritage.
Dr. Nicole Ardoin is an associate professor at Stanford University with a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Education and the Woods Institute for the Environment. She is the acting faculty director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (EIPER) in the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences. Nicole’s research focuses on environmental learning and sustainability practices, with an interest in informal and everyday-life settings, integrated social-ecological systems, and sense of place. She also researches how learning opportunities engage individuals and communities in collaborative decision-making related to the environment.
Nicole’s research collaborators include nonprofit environmental conservation organizations; parks and protected areas; museums, zoos, and aquariums; public and private, independent K-12 schools; and philanthropic foundations; among others. She uses a mix of methods and approaches in her work—including ethnography, social network analysis, and targeted case studies—and enjoys developing long-term relationships with community partners and organizations in both her research and through the courses she teaches, which also often incorporate community-engaged learning.
Nicole has a PhD in Social Ecology from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where her scholarship focused on sense of place and environmental behavior at an ecoregional scale. Through her Social Ecology Lab Group at Stanford, Nicole enjoys mentoring her own graduate students who have diverse interests centered on applying social science theoretical frames to pressing environmental challenges in a range of domestic and international settings. With more than two decades of nonprofit conservation experience, Nicole is committed to community-engaged research as well as supporting the research/practice interface. She is an Associate Editor for the Environmental Education Research journal; a trustee of the George B. Storer Foundation; chairs the Education Advisory Council of NatureBridge; and is an advisor to the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE). Nicole is the 2017 recipient of the NAAEE award for Outstanding Contributions to Research in Environmental Education and the Haas Center for Public Service’s 2018 Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize.
