Teresa Johnson

Teresa Johnson, Professor of Marine Policy, is an applied social scientist trained in the interdisciplinary fields of applied anthropology and human ecology. She was a Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center Faculty Fellow from 2016-2017 and then joined the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center in 2019.

Dr. Johnson is an expert in the areas of marine policy and the study and practice of participatory approaches to science and policy, including stakeholder engagement, fisheries co-management, transdisciplinary research, and social-ecological systems research. She applies her expertise to the study and management of marine fisheries, aquaculture, marine renewable energy. Her work also explores factors influencing resilience in Maine’s coastal communities, including livelihood diversification, graying of the fleet, and gentrification and amenity migration.

An applied researcher, she serves on several working groups of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) and as an appointed member of Maine’s Sea Urchin Zone Council. Since 2013, she has collaborated as part of the Aquaculture in Shared Waters training program and serves on the Maine Aquaculture Hub Steering Committee. From 2015-2019, she served as co-PI of NSF EPSCoR funded Sustainable Ecological Aquaculture Network (SEANET) project, where she also co-led the human dimensions research team and the development of the project’s social-ecological systems research framework. From 2009-2014, she led the Maine Tidal Power Initiative’s Human Dimensions research. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA).

In addition to her research, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in marine policy and marine social science and advises graduate and undergraduate students in the marine policy and marine social science.

Visit Dr. Johnson’s lab website for more information regarding her work.