Member Biography


Dr. Kelly Bricker

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.