Elizabeth Lowham
Fields
- Graduate Intern Coordinator
- Public Policy
- Methodology
- Environmental Policy
- Leadership and Collaboration Studies
Contact Information
- Office: Building 47, Room 11M
- Phone: 805-756-2919
- E-mail: elowham@calpoly.edu
I joined the Cal Poly political science faculty in August 2007. I spent my formative years in Casper, WY. I then attended Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where I majored in Geology and concentrated in Environmental and Technological Studies. During my time at Carleton, I studied off-campus for two trimesters. I did the fieldwork for my Geology major in Coldigioco, Italy. During my senior year, I was lucky enough to spend a trimester studying politics and policy hands-on in Washington, D.C. While studying, I worked for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. I think it was during this time when I realized that I was in a unique position to unite the skills and knowledge I had learned as a scientist and in politics.
Upon graduation, I entered the University of Colorado at Boulder to study public policy, with a focus on environmental policy. During three of the years I was in school at Boulder, I worked as a fellow on the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative. This grant, sponsored by the NSF IGERT program, brought together groups of graduate students to learn not only about climate change, but also about how to do successful interdisciplinary work at the graduate level. These years sparked my interest in collaboration and leadership. My dissertation investigated leadership practices in voluntary clean up programs at the state level. In particular, I was interested in how different participants share leadership responsibilities in environmental cleanup.
At Cal Poly, most of my teaching is through the Master of Public Policy program. My classes are focused largely on research design, methodology, and leadership and management. I also teach an Environmental Politics and Policy course and undergraduate classes in research design and methodology.
My research currently focuses largely on issues of leadership and collaboration. In particular, I'm interested in how people share leadership in situations where collaboration, not command, appears to the mode of action. While I continue my interest in brownfields, I have started research leadership in other contexts.