Brandie joined The Nature Conservancy in 2018. A quantitative Environmental Anthropologist by training, she is now a Social Science Research Associate of the Protect Oceans Lands and Waters, and the Conservation in Partnership with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Teams of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Before joining TNC she worked in academia where her research focused on evaluating the human wellbeing and environmental impacts of community-based conservation strategies promoting alternative livelihoods in tourism for communities living in and around Peru’s protected areas.  Now at TNC she continues her focus on building the evidence for community-based conservation, assessing the effectiveness of commonly employed interventions, and identifying the necessary conditions for their success. Brandie holds a doctoral degree in Ecology (emphasis in Conservation Social Science) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has had various teaching and applied research appointments in Environmental Studies, Anthropology and Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Risk work at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Disaster Center.