Kelly S. Bricker, PhD

Name, academic degree:

Kelly S. Bricker, PhD

Academic title:

Associate Professor

Affiliation:

University of Utah Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism

E-mail:

Kelly.bricker@health.utah.edu

Link to CV:

http://www.health.utah.edu/prt/faculty/kbricker.html

Research Interests/Activities in the Winter project:

Dr. Bricker is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Utah in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, with an emphasis on sustainable tourism management. Since 1986, Kelly has worked in tourism as a guide, manager, and director in international adventure travel with Sobek Expeditions and World Heritage Travel Group. With her husband Nathan Bricker, and OARS colleague George Wendt, they developed an ecotourism whitewater and sea kayaking operation called Rivers Fiji, which has been operating now since 1998.

Kelly completed her Ph.D. research with the Pennsylvania State University, where she specialized in sustainable tourism and natural resource management. She has special research and teaching interest in ecotourism, sense of place, natural resource management, and the environmental and social impacts of tourism. She has conducted research and published on ecotourism certification and management, tourism and quality of life, heritage tourism, social impacts of tourism, and impacts on natural resource tourism environments. She is currently the Chair of the Board for The International Ecotourism Society, and serves as Chair of the Board for the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.

With Dr. Brownlee, her interests in the Winter Project include the utilization of quantitative and qualitative approaches, to investigate hard and soft adventures and winter recreationists’ sense of place at Yellowstone National Park. They will examine hard and soft adventures through a review of park policies, on-site assessments, and interviews with park professionals, guides, tour operators, and winter recreationists. They will use these results as a foundation to investigate the relationships between place attachment, specialization, and preferences for management actions through an on-site and follow up survey of winter recreationists. And will examine winter recreationists’ perceptions and preferences for weather conditions, seasonal attributes, and climatic considerations through on-site interviews and photo elicitation.