Dr. Kelly Bricker is a Professor and Director of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism at the
University of Utah, located in the College of Health. She completed her Ph.D.
research with the Pennsylvania State University, where she specialized in
sustainable tourism and protected area management. She has research and
teaching interests in ecotourism, sense of place, community development, visitor
management, value of nature-based experiences, and the impacts of tourism. She has
authored and edited books on sustainability, which highlight case studies in
tourism meeting environmental and societal issues in Sustainable Tourism & the Millennium Development Goals: Effecting
Positive Change; educational texts focused on adventure education in Adventure Programing and Travel for the 21st
Century and graduate education in De-Mystifying
Theories in Tourism Research; and most recently, relevant to current
projects, co-edited This Land Is Your
Land: Toward a Better Understanding of Nature’s Resiliency-Building and
Restorative Power for Armed Forces Personnel, Veterans, and Their Families
(Sagamore Publishing, LLC).
Dr. Bricker serves the board of
the Global Sustainable Tourism Council as Vice Chair, the Executive Committee
of the University of Utah Global Change and Sustainability Center, and Executive
Committee of the Tourism and Protected Area Specialist Group of the IUCN. With
her husband Nathan, George Wendt of OARS, and 12 communities in Fiji, she
worked to establish an ecotourism project called Rivers Fiji – which is the
first river lease for conservation of its kind.