Dr. Karen Hardee joined PAI as Vice President of Research in 2007 with more than twenty years experience in social demography. Dr. Hardee has focused on population and development, family planning and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, gender integration, and monitoring and evaluation.
Dr. Hardee provides technical direction on PAI’s diverse research portfolio, including population and climate change, reproductive health supplies, the integration of HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health, financing, and gender and HIV/AIDS. Dr. Hardee has led PAI’s research on population, sexual reproductive health and adaptation to climate change.
Prior to joining PAI, Dr. Hardee was senior advisor at John Snow, Inc., where her work focused on building harmonized tools for global partners to assess and improve the quality of data reported to measure success in global health initiatives. Dr. Hardee was director of Constella Futures’ Center for Research and Evaluation, and director of research on the POLICY Project. Dr. Hardee also worked at Family Health International as a deputy director of the Service Delivery Research Division and principal research scientist on the Women’s Studies Project and at USAID and the U.S. Bureau of the Census as a presidential management fellow.
Dr. Hardee holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University’s Population and Development Program. Dr. Hardee has consulted for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and has received funding for research and evaluation projects from Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, UNDP, USAID, CDC, the Gates Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Hardee holds a B.A. from Duke University in Comparative Area Studies and a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University.
The old adage, think globally and act locally, is key to addressing climate change. Community-based, integrated approaches and solutions are essential to adaptation.
If we don’t stay in the discussion on population and climate change and insist on family planning and reproductive health programs that respect individual rights, what solutions might emerge from people who are unaware about what can happen when population policies and programs are driven purely by demographic targets?
