Dr Katie Woolaston

Katie grew up on a coastal town in Far Northern New South Wales and now lives in Brisbane, Queensland, with partner, children, dogs, chickens and bee hives. She completed her Law and Psychology degrees in 2006 and started practicing law in 2007. She transitioned to research and policy in 2012 and completed her PhD in Law in 2019. Katie’s thesis was on the Governance of Human-Wildlife Conflict, a topic which required analysis of the ‘human’ side of a perceived biodiversity problem. Her thesis was transformed into a Monograph and published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Using social and environment justice principles, and social sciences methodologies, Katie’s research has since the regulation of the human-wildlife-environment relationship through the One Health approach. She is particularly interested in using the social sciences to resolve long-held and deeply-rooted attitudes and values that are contrary to conservation and embedding such processes in law and policy. She was an expert on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) panel concerning Biodiversity and Pandemics and is the Chair of the Technical Advisory Group of the United Nations Environment Program’s 'Nature4Health' Initiative. Her second book, ‘The Cambridge Handbook on One Health and the Law’ will be published in 2025.

Katie is an expert in policy-making and evidence-based policy, having completed a research fellowship on ‘The Epistemology of Evidence-Based Policy’ at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 2023. Katie’s interests also lie in broader concepts and methods of governance, meaning the ways in which governments, organisations and communities push and enable behaviour change. She works across boundaries and disciplines to communicate science and governance methods in order to solve sustainability problems.