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Senior Researcher
 
Dr. Heather A. Fischer is a senior researcher at our center. Before to coming to the center in July 2018, Heather completed a PhD in Geography at Arizona State University in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, her dissertation research focused on the development and research of the Map of Life-Denali citizen science program in Denali National Park and Preserve Alaska. In this program, volunteers used the Map of Life mobile app. to record species sighting in the park.  Heather assessed the volunteer and scientific outcomes of the project, especially focusing on the quality of the location-based species data being collected by volunteers. Heather was also a postdoctoral researcher at ASU’s Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, where she oversaw the development of citizen science and public engagement projects in the Phoenix metropolitan area, including the HeatMappers project. This project focuses on involving low-income and homeless volunteers to use temperature and location sensor to record their heat risk in the Phoenix area during their daily lives. 

 

Heather’s research interests include data quality of volunteer-collected data, developing citizen science and informal learning programs with diverse groups of participants, evaluating the use of citizen science data for scientific research, and open access to volunteer collected data. Heather has particular expertise in geographic information science, volunteered geographic information, and social science and program evaluation methodologies.

 

Center Projects