Rebecca Zarger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF) and Research Affiliate of the USF Water Institute and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She has a B.A. in Anthropology and English from Wake Forest University (1995) and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia (2002). Her research focuses on environmental anthropology--highlighting connections between people and the environment and stories of environmental change in the Tampa Bay area and Belize in Central America. Her research focuses on human-environment dynamics, environmental knowledge and practice, coastal urban sustainability, youth environments, water resources, climate change, social and environmental justice, urban forest ethnography, and informal science education in the US Southeast and the Caribbean. She is Past-President of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association and her research is currently supported by NSF's Coastlines and People program and Convergence Accelerator: Blue Economy track, as well as NOAA, with past funding from NSF's Human Social Dynamics and Research Traineeship/Food-Energy-Water Nexus programs. Dr. Zarger held a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellowship at the National Academies of Science, working with the Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change in Washington, DC. She has partnered with extension agents, planners, and policy makers in the Southeast U.S. (Tampa Bay) over the last decade to better understand lived experiences of a changing climate in a growing coastal city; storytelling about climate change impacts; how social inequities are reflected in experiences of climate change; and participatory methods to co-design climate futures scenarios. Her research on these topics has been featured in local, national, and international media. She received the NSF/Every Page Foundation Ocean Decade Champion award in 2024.