Kayla Gabehart

Kayla Gabehart is a policy scholar specializing in rural-urban conflict, environmental and energy policy, democratic inclusion, and the role of emotions in policy and the policy process. She was born and raised in a small, agricultural town on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. She grew up working on her family’s cattle farm. This is where she first became interested in the environmental politics of agriculture, as well as policy conflict between rural towns and urban centers.

Gabehart received bachelor’s degrees from the University of Colorado Denver in history and psychology, with a minor in political science in 2014. From 2016 to 2023, she worked full-time in the public service sector as a federal government contractor. She served as a fiscal grant specialist for Head Start, and then as the associate director of two educational non-profits for students in grades 4-12 based at the University of Colorado Denver, National History Day in Colorado and Colorado Student Leaders Institute.

In 2024, Gabehart completed her Ph.D. in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. She also worked as a research assistant in the Center for Policy and Democracy, and as an instructor for the Master’s of Public Policy, Master’s of Public Administration and Bachelor’s of Arts in Public Administration programs.

Her dissertation, titled, The Ties that Bind: The Role of Rural Identity in Policymaking and Polarization, focuses on rural-urban policy conflicts around environmental issues that implicate agriculture, and utilizes the ACF and Emotion-Belief Analysis to analyze the role of culture and social identity in the rural-urban divide and larger political polarization.

Gabehart joined the faculty at Michigan Technological University as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy in the fall of 2024.