Chilton Tippin is a cultural anthropologist with interests in the anthropology of water, the social lives of rivers, political ecology, immigration, and how local communities adapt to and resist climate-change induced drought. His dissertation focused on how local people mobilize to defend their communities and their watersheds from various threats posed by climate change, overdevelopment, and water contamination along the Rio Grande. As a postdoctoral ORISE researcher participating with the USGS, his work examines actionable science and how climate science can be integrated into the planning processes of Department of the Interior agencies, such as the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.