From Manhattan to Kentucky’s country cafés and then research labs filled with code, crops, and climate models, Karin Pekarchik’s career has always been about bridging gaps and making connections. Her latest mission? Helping CLIMBS cultivate a resilient academic ecosystem—one rooted in research and relationships.
Throughout her career, Pekarchik has gravitated toward spaces where community and complexity have overlapped. She has moved gracefully between publishing houses, the horse community, restaurants, and research offices—but the throughline has always been community synergy with a purpose. In her early career in NYC publishing, she connected audiences to culture, current events, and literature. At UK’s Proposal Development Office and Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Department (BAE), she built bridges between faculty and funding, research and impact. The café she owned in rural Kentucky became a hub for farmers, local entrepreneurs and community makers, before the 2008 economic downturn forced her to close. “Every role I’ve taken on has involved untangling complexity—then weaving it into something meaningful,” Pekarchik says. “To me, that’s at the heart of community: moving together while holding space for differences.”
Pekarchik calls her years at UK, and now her role in CLIMBS, the third chapter of her career, and she is looking forward to applying her experiences with complexity and community to the project. “BAE was a place where ideas moved between students, faculty, staff, and research fields,” Pekarchik says. “That kind of dynamic energy—it’s what I see in CLIMBS, too.”
As statewide program coordinator, Pekarchik will be a bridge builder for the CLIMBS project, further strengthening bonds between the KY NSF EPSCoR administration team, research team, and outreach team. She will coordinate events, manage multi-layered data streams, and align efforts across institutional, state, and NSF national priorities. Beyond logistics, her work, like all of CLIMBS’ work, will spread through communities, translating high-level science into programs that touch hundreds of Kentuckians and build climate resilience across the commonwealth.
“Karin has already hit the ground running,” says Professor Czar Crofcheck, Co-PI of CLIMBS, “and I’m looking forward to working with her to elevate the CLIMBS program to another level.”
One of her first projects is developing a multi-part workshop on grant writing for the CLIMBS Canvas Hub, a familiar subject for Pekarchik from her time at the Proposal Development Office. “We want the CLIMBS Canvas Hub to feel like a living, breathing space,” says Pekarchik, “where researchers, educators, and students from around the state can find each other, share tools, and grow something bigger than any single institution could build on its own.”
More than anything, as Pekarchik grows into her role and learns the nuances of CLIMBS, she hopes to build one thing, and that is trust. “To me, success this first year means one thing: that faculty know they can come to me—and trust I’ll have answers or find them.”
