Kyle Bocinsky (Ph.D. Washington State University 2014) is the Director of Climate Extension in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana.

Dr. Bocinsky worked closely with Crow Canyon researchers since starting as a graduate student at Washington State University in 2008. His archaeological research focuses on human-environment relationships in the past and climate change impacts on ancestral Pueblo farming communities. As a graduate student, he worked on the Village Ecodynamics Project and interned with the Basketmaker Communities Project. In 2017, Dr. Bocinsky was named the first William D. Lipe Chair of Research and Director of the Research Institute.

While serving as the Director of the Research Institute and the William D. Lipe Chair in Research at Crow Canyon, Kyle managed several Research Institute projects, including the Pueblo Farming Project, the SKOPE project, the CC-DATA project, and the computational legacy of the Village Ecodynamics Project. Kyle is a Co-Principal Investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation: Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments, or the SKOPE project. Kyle’s SKOPE research—managed through his Crow Canyon affiliation—develops large-scale, high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions for the southwestern US. Kyle is a long-time member of the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP), and has been collaborating with Crow Canyon researchers for over a decade. He was part of the field crew in the 2009–2012 Mesa Verde Community Center Survey, and helped develop substantial portions of the VEP computer simulation of ancient Pueblo society. Kyle’s scholarly interests include computational archaeology, traditional ecological knowledge, complexity, human behavioral ecology, foraging theory, and plant and animal domestication. Kyle is the author of several software packages in the R programming language, including FedData for easy access to federated datasets, and PaleoCAR for high-resolution paleoclimate reconstruction. Kyle is a Co-Project Director of the Native Waters on Arid Lands project, where he is working with an interdisciplinary team to enhance climate resilience on tribal land across the western U.S., and is also Co-Project Director of the Montana Drought and Climate project, where he is developing climate planning tools for agricultural producers in Montana. Kyle lives with his husband John and their family in Missoula, Montana.