Linda E. Méndez-Barrientos, PhD, is associate professor in the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) area at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Because climate change impacts are disproportionately experienced through water, her interdisciplinary research program bridges environmental science — particularly water and groundwater management — with public administration scholarship to unpack the effectiveness of climate adaptations, transitions, and institutional reforms. Dr. Méndez-Barrientos' goal is to advance a research agenda that supports governance reforms for equity and environmental sustainability.

Her work has been published in top academic journals across a wide range of disciplinary fields including Nature Water, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Climatic Change, Scientific Reports, Society & Natural Resources, Ecology & Society, Environmental Policy & Planning, Environmental Policy & Governance, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, Water Security, and Environmental Justice. Méndez-Barrientos is finishing a book manuscript that examines two of the world's most ambitious governance reforms efforts to address unsustainability and inequality. She focuses on South Africa's land and water reform to redress the heritage of inequality in natural resources access after apartheid, and California's massive groundwater reform to deal with chronic groundwater overdraft and severe drought due to climate change. Beyond these two case studies, Méndez-Barrientos' work spans collaborations across the American West, South Africa, Peru, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, amassing over 1.5 million dollars in external funding from various organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Méndez-Barrientos earned her PhD in ecology from the University of California, Davis and holds an MSc in water management from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and an MSc on tropical agrarian systems from Montpellier SupAgro in France. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she was an assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver, where she directed the Environmental Justice and Policy Research Lab. Before academia, she served as an environmental policy analyst for several years with the Environmental Defense Fund.