Nicholas Institute Staff
Lydia
Olander
Lydia Olander is the Senior Associate Director for Ecosystem
Services for the Nicholas Institute. She has worked on a
range of issues for the institute including: national energy
and transportation policy and their linkages with climate
change and climate policy; oil and energy security; clarifying
new science relevant to climate change policy for decision
makers; and water issues for a rapidly developing North
Carolina. Currently she is focused on developing the Institute's
expanding initiative on ecosystem services and working on
the burgeoning multinational effort to add avoided deforestation
into future international climate agreements.
Lydia joined the Nicholas Institute after spending a year
as a AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working
with Sen. Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues.
Before moving to Washington, D.C., she was a researcher
with the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s department
of global ecology, where she studied the biogeochemical
impacts of logging in the Brazilian Amazon and worked with
new techniques to extrapolate impacts regionally using remote
sensing. She received her doctorate from Stanford University,
where she studied nutrient cycling in tropical forests,
and has a masters in forest science from Yale University.
She has published in professional journals, including Ecosystems,
Biogeochemistry, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, Forest Ecology
and Management, and Earth Interactions.
