Peter Howe

S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources

Environment and Society

Peter D. Howe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment and Society. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Dr. Howe is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist with roots in human-environment geography and geographic information science. His research focuses on the intersection of human decision making with climate change and environmental hazards, using large-scale social surveys, geo-spatial analysis, statistical modeling, and geovisualization. In 2018, Dr. Howe received a 5-year National Science Foundation CAREER award to model the dynamics of public perceptions and behaviors in the context of climate change adaptation, and he was a recipient of the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He serves on the leadership team for the $2.7M NSF Climate Adaptation Science graduate research traineeship program at USU. Dr. Howe’s research has appeared in leading journals such as Nature Climate Change and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and his publications have received over 1400 citations. His work has received widespread national media attention and public engagement, including four stories in the New York Times since 2015.