Thank you all for your very kind works. Jo's grad school mentor and now colleague and dear friend wrote this tribute. It is focused on her professional life and will give you a sense of her accomplishments. Her department at MIT has started a memorial page with comments from her students and colleagues. It is very touching and I hope their kind words reach her and let her know how much she was appreciated and loved. Last night, she was surrounded by friends and family. She will be missed by many and it is my hope that the seeds she has sown with her students will flower and carry her ideas and work forward.
Dr. JoAnn Carmin, a leading scholar on urban adaptation to climate change and on environmental movements in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, died July 15, 2014 due to complications of advanced breast cancer at age 54.
Born October 17, 1957, Dr. Carmin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organizational behavior at Cornell University, where she took an early interest in the study of environmental citizen organizations and movements, environmental governance and environmental justice. She went on to earn the Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999. While there she developed a particular interest in local environmental politics and the many citizen environmental movements emerging in post-Communist Eastern Europe, beginning with extensive field work in the newly independent Czech Republic. She taught first at Virginia Tech and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT she was a tenured associate professor of environmental policy and planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Director of the Program on Environmental Governance and Sustainability in MIT’s Center for International Studies.
At MIT she became one of the early scholars to study the emerging responses of cities around the world to global climate change, with support first from the World Bank and then also from the National Science Foundation. By the time of her death she was becoming recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on emerging urban policies for adapting to the growing risks of climate change. She served as lead author of the report of Working Group II of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and coordinating lead author of the urban technical report for the 2011-12 U.S. National Climate Assessment, as Associate Editor of Urban Climate, and on the boards of numerous professional journals and scholarly organizations. In 2011-2013 she was the recipient of a prestigious Abe Fellowship to study in Japan; she also was awarded visiting research fellowships to study at Duke University and the Prague University of Economics.
