Dr. Lynn is a Research Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and has been working in Africa since 1994.  Dr. Lynn received her first degree in Elementary education from Penn State University which led to several years of teaching in the Baltimore City School District before she joined the Peace Corps as a teacher trainer in the town of Otjiwarongo, Namibia. During her Peace Corps tenure she founded the Earthwise Environmental Club for primary and secondary students, and worked extensively with the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). 

Dr. Lynn received both her MSc (Rangeland Ecosystem Science) and PhD (Ecology) at Colorado State University where she studied the impacts of conservation policy and ecology on Maasai pastoralists, as well as the impacts of cultivation for both Maasai pastoral livelihoods and wildlife movement at multiple scales in northern Tanzania. She has current research projects in Kenya, Tanzania and the US related to local people, wildlife conservation, risk perception, traditional ecological knowledge, fire, environmental governance, participatory mapping, landscape ecology, and the development of tools for mobile devices to collect social and ecological research data.