Faculty Experts

Our People Are Our Greatest Asset

The Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management is recognized worldwide for its cutting-edge research in outdoor recreation, sustainable tourism, parks and protected areas, environmental education and communication, sport and society, equity and environmental justice, geoanalytics, community health and well-being, and community capacity and resilience. Our research teams are cross-disciplinary and are often comprised of experts from a variety of fields within the department, the broader College of Natural Resources, other colleges at NC State and representatives from government agencies, the private sector, industry or other universities.

Get to know some of our amazing departmental faculty

• Carla Barbieri – Specializes in agritourism, seeking to maximize farmers’ gains, conserve natural and cultural resources, and foster societal benefits.
• Perver Baran – Specializes in immersive virtual environments, innovative public participation methods, and natural and built environments’ contributions to health.
• Jason Bocarro – Specializes in nature-based health programming, built environment and public spaces and human health, sport for health and community development, leadership and management of sport and recreation organizations, legacy of mega sport events.
• Kyle Bunds – Specializes in sport and sustainable community development, primarily in the areas of environmental policy and management, political ecology, and equitability.
• Kim Bush – Specializes in social equity and inclusion in sport and physical activity and scholarship of teaching and learning.
• Jonathan Casper – Specializes in sport marketing and sustainability.
• Bethany Cutts – Specializes in human dimensions of the environment and geospatial analytics.
• Mike Edwards – Specializes in sport for health and community development, rural physical activity and health, youth sport, sport organizational management, and program evaluation.
• Myron Floyd – Specializes in the promotion of parks and public greenspaces as settings for physical activity and understanding race and ethnic disparities in outdoor recreation participation.
• Aaron Hipp – Specializes in the use of public spaces and active living, primarily using quantitative methods and new technologies.
• Whitney Knollenberg – Specializes in the role of leadership and policy in sustainable tourism development, particularly in the context of rural tourism and food and beverage tourism.
• Lincoln Larson – Specializes in human dimensions of natural resource management.
• KangJae “Jerry” Lee – Specializes in social justice issues related to race and ethnicity, public parks, outdoor recreation, and the relationship between leisure and subjective well-being.
• Yu-Fai Leung – Specializes in the study of innovations in planning, management, and monitoring of visitor (recreation and tourism) use and impacts in parks and protected areas.
• Duarte Morais – Specialises in the development of tourism microentrepreneurship and its integration in formal tourism systems for added destination equity and competitiveness.
• Erin Seekamp – Specializes in climate adaptation planning, community-based conservation and conservation behaviors.
• Kathryn Stevenson – Specializes in environmental education, including understanding how to connect children with nature and empower young people to address environmental challenges in their communities.
• Stacy Supak – Specializes in undergraduate and graduate GIS education and Geoanalytics supporting protected area management.
• Jelena Vukomanovic – Specializes in land-change modeling, growth around parks and protected areas, viewscapes and drivers of growth, and participatory mapping and modeling.