Virginia Burkett

Dr. Virginia Burkett currently serves as Chief Scientist for Climate and Land Use Change at the United States Geological Survey.  Burkett has published roughly 100 journal articles, book chapters and reports that focus on wetlands, global change, and low-lying coastal systems.  She was a Lead Author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third, Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports and the IPCC Technical Paper on Water. She was also a Lead Author of the First, Second and Third US National Climate Assessments.  She has served as Chair of the $2.6 billion US Global Change Research Program and as USGS Associate Director for Climate and Land Use Change.

Prior to leading climate change science at USGS, Burkett was Chief of the Forest Ecology Branch at the USGS National Wetlands Research Center. Prior to her work at USGS, Burkett was Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, where she formerly served as Deputy Secretary. Dr. Burkett is a U.S. delegate to the international Group on Earth Observations (GEO), which coordinates the collection and delivery of satellite and in-situ Earth Observations from 114 nations. She is Co-Chair of GEO’s Climate Change Working Group and a US Alternate Principal to AmeriGEO (21 countries in the Western Hemisphere). She served as a Senior Editor of the journal Regional (subnational) Environmental Change (2012-2022) and is an Editor of the journal Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics.