Victoria Herrmann, PhD

Dr. Victoria Herrmann is a Senior Fellow and Leadership Group member at The Arctic Institute, where her research focuses on climate change, community adaptation, resilient development, and geopolitics. From 2016 to 2021, Victoria was the President and Managing Director of The Arctic Institute, where she led the U.S. incorporation and global growth of TAI as a premiere think and do tank. Previously, she was TAI’s North America Director.

Victoria has testified before the U.S. Senate, served as the Alaska Review Editor for the Fourth National Climate Assessment, contributes to The Guardian and Scientific American on climate policy, and was named one of the most 100 influential people in climate policy worldwide in 2022 by Apolitical. She has published in many peer-review journals and her expert opinion has appeared on CNN, BBC, and NPR among others, and was a 2021-2022 White House Fellow. 

Victoria currently serves as the Principle Investigator of the National Science Foundation funded Arctic Migration in Harmony: An Interdisciplinary Network on Littoral Species, Settlements, and Cultures on the Move, a major international initiative to integrate discipline-isolated research on changing Arctic migration patterns and advance knowledge on the movement of peoples, economies, cultures, and ecosystems catalyzed by environmental variability. Beyond the Arctic, Victoria studies climate-induced displacement, migration, and relocation in North America and Fiji as a National Geographic Explorer. In her first National Geographic project, America’s Eroding Edges, she traveled across the country interviewing 350 local leaders to identify what’s needed most to safeguard coastal communities against the unavoidable impacts of climate change. Her current National Geographic project, Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past, is a collaborative initiative between ten local communities, site management teams, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites. The project draws upon scientific and local knowledge to find sustainable and culturally appropriate solutions to the long-term preservation of iconic cultural heritage sites against climate change impacts.

She serves on the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States’ Board of Directors, on the Steering Committee of the Climigration Network, and as an IF/THEN Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Victoria teaches environmental communication; science communication at the University Centre of the Westfjords, Iceland; and public speaking at National Geographic Sciencetelling Bootcamps. She was previously a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a Fulbright Awardee to Canada, a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in Geography.