Cara Aisling Augustenborg (born 1978) is an American and Irish environmental scientist, media pundit, assistant professor at University College Dublin and a member of Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council and President Michael D. Higgins' Council of State.
[1][2] Augustenborg was born in 1978[3] in Germany where her father, who has Danish ancestry, was stationed as a United States Air Force fighter pilot; her mother is from County Kerry, Ireland.
[5] She moved to Ireland in 2003 with a Fulbright Scholarship to do research at Teagasc in County Wexford, and in 2007 moved to do post-doctoral research at Trinity College Dublin's School of Business and University College Dublin's School of Agriculture.
[4] Since 2011 Augustenborg has led her own consultancy company, Impact Research Management, based in Bray.
[8] In 2019, she was appointed by Michael D. Higgins as one of the seven presidential nominees on the Irish Council of State, a body which advises the president.