About

Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger is a geographer and an Associate Professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Klinger and her international, interdisciplinary research team have conducted extensive multilingual qualitative and quantitative fieldwork on four continents over the past two decades on three distinct yet interlinked initiatives: critical minerals supply chains, global space politics, and rural and Indigenous community resilience.

She has previously served as a technical expert to the International Standards Organization Committee 298: Rare Earth Supply Chain Transparency and Traceability, and as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book with Cornell University Press: Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes.

She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, a Certificate in China Studies from The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an alum of Rotary International Youth Exchange.