Dr. Mary Emery, Director of Rural Prosperity Nebraska, focuses on community engaged research that addresses climate resilience, technology adoption, leadership systems, and community change initiatives. Her research interest focuses on structures and processes for incorporating community-engaged research into the development of science that addresses wicked problems like climate change and rural community decline and on strategies to improve the work of interdisciplinary research teams. Recently she served as the evaluator for an NSF-funded Future of Work grant focusing on precision ag and is the PI and key evaluator for a USDA Regional Food Business Center Grant ($11,000,000). She is a Co-PI on an NSF EPSCoR Track II grant focusing on incorporating climate modeling as a resource for increasing community resiliency and on both an NCRCRD and a USDA NIFA grant intended to reconceptualize how we understand community leadership from a focus on training leaders to developing resilient community leadership systems using a community-engaged research approach that merges participatory action research with the Living Lab approach.