Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger (she/her) is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. Dr. Klinger and her research team are supported by the National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Climate and Land Use Alliance to conduct in-depth field-based and global-scope research on competing uses for energy-transition metals, materials, and infrastructures. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. 
The Klinger Lab’s global research agenda consists of three distinct yet interlinked initiatives: critical minerals supply chains, global space politics, and rural and Indigenous community climate resilience. Dr. Klinger has conducted extensive multilingual qualitative and quantitative fieldwork on four continents over the past two decades and mentors her students to do the same. The first initiative is situated at the intersection of technology-critical minerals, environment, and society. In collaboration with diverse stakeholders, Dr. Klinger and her team’s current work focuses on characterizing the environmental, social, and climate impacts of rare earth and other critical mineral supply chains, from extraction to disposal, and formulates policy proposals to accelerate a just transition to a low-carbon future. She is a member of the US delegation to the International Standards Organization Technical Committee 298, which is tasked with developing transparency and sustainability standards for rare earth mining and processing. Dr. Klinger is the Principle Investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded project Characterizing the Global Illicit Trade in Energy-Critical Materials using Machine Learning, Remote Sensing, and Qualitative Research.
The second initiative has followed rare earth elements from extraction to the satellites and satellite-linked technologies for which they are crucial, with particular attention to the use of these technologies by countries in Africa and Latin America, and among Indigenous communities living on the front lines of global change. Rather than viewing outer space as too remote for daily concern, Klinger Lab’s research illuminates the environmental geopolitics connecting human-environment relations within and beyond Earth’s atmosphere, through a careful attention to material and waste flows.
The third initiative is informed by the observation that large-scale resource extraction and space infrastructure construction has proceeded at the expense of already-marginalized communities, often costing them their lives and ancestral lands. With her students and research partners, Dr. Klinger collaborates with communities living in the shadow of current and former mining and space infrastructure sites as well as remote Indigenous and nomadic communities.
Dr. Klinger’s past research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Irmgard Coninx Stiftung, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies China-Africa Research Initiative, and the Boston University East Asian Career Development Professorship. She previously served as the co-director of the Land Use and Livelihoods Initiative at the Global Development Policy Center. She is the recipient, together with the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, PA, of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2023 Horizon Prize for her contributions to public awareness and education of rare earth elements.
She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, a Certificate in China Studies from The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an alum of Rotary International Youth Exchange.