Dr. Hunt is an Associate Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management, and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences from Texas A&M University, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Hunt’s research focuses on the ways that tourism can be leveraged to support biodiversity conservation. In field-based research in Latin America, Dr. Hunt employs a background in environmental anthropology to assess the impact of tourism on conservation and community development around parks and protected areas.
His Fulbright Scholar and NSF-funded research projects focus on the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, while earlier ethnographic experiences focused on the Peruvian Amazon, coastal and highland Nicaragua, Lake Atitlan Guatemala, the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, and the fringing coral islands around Cartagena Colombia. When not in the field, collaborates on survey-based conservation psychology research into the ways that travel influences people’s subsequent pro-environmental behavior. At Penn State, Dr. Hunt co-leads the Penn State Parks and People Tanzania field courses, and he teaches in-residence courses focusing on tourism, eco-tourism, nature-based tourism, responsible travel, environmental ethics, ethnographic research methods, and social and environmental sustainability. Earlier in his career, Dr. Hunt was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, where he worked alongside CREST co-founder William Durham.