Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois, PhD
About Me
Chelsea Lissette Cervantes De Blois is the current U.S. Department of State's Lead Climate & Environmental Impacts and Security Analyst in The Office of the Geographer and Global Issues where she supports the Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs through high level briefings and written products by using all-source analysis.
Dr. Cervantes De Blois has 16+ years of expertise in monitoring complex human-environmental dynamics of climate and environmental impacts through geospatial modeling by using qualitative and quantitive datasets.
Prior to Dr. Cervantes De Blois' employment at the U.S. State Department she has also worked on extensive collaborations, consultancies, and research with diverse organizations such as the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the World Bank Group, the German Federal Ministry, the United Nations, and commercial agricultural firms in Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, and the United States.
Dr. Cervantes De Blois received her PhD from the University of Minnesota, specializing in Geosciences (Remote Sensing, Cartography and Geographic Information Systems) and Population Studies. She is also an alumna of the Population Trainee Program at the Minnesota Population Center. Dr. Cervantes de Blois earned a Masters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, specializing in regional languages of Eurasia and the Caucasus. She earned her undergraduate Bachelor of Science from UW-Madison’s Soil Sciences and Agriculture and Applied Economics.
GISciences
The utilization of spatial analysis and data visualization is at the core of Dr. Cervantes De Blois' methodology which has been recognized and honored by the academic, federal, and private sectors.
Details on invited talks, panels, and lectures focused on geospatial, environmental, and data generation can be found on the "Interviews & Publicity tab".
Climate Change
Dr. Cervantes De Blois has a unique and extensive background in climate and environmental impacts work. She has supported two U.S. Special Envoys for Climate Change: Secretary John Kerry and Todd Stern.
Prior to her scientific-policy support role at U.S. Department of State she was an invited, visiting Climate Change Researcher at CGIAR to publish three World Bank reports focused on Mexico's Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) as a food security, agricultural, and climate impacts expert.
During Dr. Cervantes De Blois' PhD program she worked at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) office in Baku, Azerbaijan where she worked on environmental and climate projects.
Moreover, Dr. Cervantes De Blois also was a delegate for the Stanford U.S. - Russia Forum (SURF) where she collaborated and published with the Climate and Environmental Working Group with scientists from Stanford University's Earth System Science Faculty, Moscow's National Research University Higher School of Economics Faculty, and Moscow State University's Geology Faculty (2017-2018). The impact of her collaboration lead to an invitation to present with her collaborators the impacts of permafrost degradation on high latitude communities in Alaska and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Northwestern Siberia for Vladimir Barbin, the Senior Arctic Official of the Russian Federation, and for Antoly Antonov, the Russian Ambassador to United States.
Geography
Dr. Cervantes De Blois' expertise in Geosciences and Demography has given her the skillset to apply her quantitative expertise in Eurasia, coupled with her language skills (Russian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Persian) funded by the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) in Baku, Azerbaijan (2019); the Boren Fellow in Azerbaijan (2017-2018), the Title VIII from the U.S. State Department in St. Petersburg, Russia (2017); and several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships. Her research training and specialization is applying spatial sciences and demographic methods while approaching complex human-environmental systems in data-sparse regions, specifically at the global scale.