Maria Carmen Lemos is Professor of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Senior Policy Scholar at the Udall Center for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Arizona.  She is a co-founder of Icarus (Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences), which seeks foster collaboration and exchange between scholars focusing on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change.  She was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5) and has served in a number of the US National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences committees including Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change (2009), America Climate Choice Science Panel (2010) and the Board on Environmental Change and Society (2008-present). She has MSc and PhD degrees in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. Her research particularly focuses in understanding: (a) the intersection between development and climate, especially concerning the relationship between anti-poverty programs and risk management (b) the use of technoscientific information, especially seasonal climate (El Nino forecasting) in building adaptive capacity to climate variability and change (drought planning, water management, and agriculture) in the U.S. (Great Lakes) and Latin America (Brazil, Mexico and Chile); (c) the impact of technocratic decisionmaking on issues of democracy and equity; (d) the co-production of science and policy and the role of technocrats and boundary organizations in increasing the usability of science in climate in decision-making, especially applied to climate adaptation in developed and less developed regions.