Professor Lave’s research and teaching combine critical social and physical science to better understand the environment. A past winner of IU’s Campus Catalyst Award for Excellence in Teaching Sustainability, she encourages students to develop deep understandings of environmental processes, such as flooding, along with clear analyses of their uneven and unjust social impacts.

Her most recent book, Streams of Revenue: the Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems it Creates (MIT Press, 2021, co-authored with Martin Doyle) focuses on stream mitigation banking, an environmental market in the US that allows streams to be damaged to enable the creation of housing, highways, etc. as long as the developers pay to restore equivalent streams elsewhere. The book has catalyzed a national policy discussion about how to improve the physical outcomes of mitigation banking.

Professor Lave is also the author or editor of five other books and dozens of articles, edits three book series, and has given major talks and workshops to academic and popular audiences on four continents. She served as chair of IU’s Department of Geography from 2019-2022.