Karen McGlathery is Director of the Environmental Resilience Institute and Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is also Director of the Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research program, a collaboration of eight universities and 25 researchers funded by the U.S. government to understand how climate impacts coastal communities. She has previously held positions as Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, and visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the National Environmental Research institute in Denmark.

Her research focuses on the effects of climate change, nutrient pollution and species invasions on seagrass, seaweed and salt marsh ecosystems. Based on long-term research on carbon sequestration in restored seagrass meadows, her group wrote the international protocol for issuing carbon credits for seagrass restoration in the voluntary carbon market and their work led to government legislation in Virginia to allow carbon offset trading for seagrass restoration. In addition to Virginia, she and her students have worked in New England, Florida, Bermuda, Denmark, New Zealand, and Mozambique.