Dr. Michelle Hilleary serves as a Supervisory Environmental Planner at the Institute for Water Resources, Water Resources Center based in Alexandria, VA, where she works on planning, collaboration, risk communication, and decision support tool development. She also serves as a Professor of Practice for Virginia Tech's Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability in the Online and Executive Master of Natural Resources in Global Sustainability. She previously served as the Eurasia Branch Chief in the International Affairs Program at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she oversaw financial and technial assistance programs in the Asia-Pacific region, facilitating wildlife conservation and scientific exchange. Michelle also previously worked at the Institute for Water Resources as a decision analyst and environmental planner, where she built capacity of domestic and international professionals in shared vision planning and provided support to projects. As a Presidential Management Fellow and course leader at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Conservation Training Center, she designed and led courses on climate change, vulnerability assessments, scenario planning, adaptation planning, and structured decision making, also facilitating structured decision making processes from complex ecological issues to administrative management and organizational design. Dr. Hilleary received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Botany, researching impacts of climate and policy changes on Tibetan yak herding livelihoods and alpine meadow plant biodiversity in Northwest Yunnan province, China.