about

My research group at NC State is accepting students. If you are thinking about a Ph.D. in engineering with a focus on data science, simulation, and machine learning methods applied to problems quantifying and reducing the impact of climate change on communities (particularly vulnerable ones), please feel free to reach out. Similarly, if you are a current ISE doctoral student in the SAO area looking for a research advisor please send me an email. See more about my research group at this link here.

Originally from Wilmington NC, I am an Assistant Professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University (starting January 2023).

I am currently a postdoc in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University in the Fletcher Lab, and a fellow of the 2021 cohort of the Rising Environmental Leaders Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

I hold a Ph.D. from the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University in the Laboratory for Advancing Sustainable Critical Infrastructure under the supervision of Professor Roshi Nateghi. I'm also a proud alum of the ISE department, graduating with my BS in ISE in 2016 from NC State.

Broadly, my research focuses on formulating data scientific and machine learning methods for extracting patterns from messy, complex, and high-dimensional data. These are applied to quantifing how climate change disproportionately impacts marginalized groups.

research

We must build a physical and social world which is resilient to climate change. These benefits must be equitably and justly distributed and address systematic inequities which have long-existed in infrastructure systems.

Currently, I am developing hybrid engineering/data-scientific methods to quantify the disproportionate impact of climate change on low-income communitites, and communities of color with a focus on how current methodologies of promoting resilience engender unequal climate and disaster impacts. These techniques utilize operations research, civil engineering, and mixed-methods approaches, grounded in social theory, to create multidimenional charactizations of the dynamcis of communitites under climate change.

I am broadly interested in addressing these themes:

  • Resilience & Equity: How does design-for-resilience differ from design-for-equity?

  • Engineering and Climate Justice: How can climate and environmental justice principles –such as the sharing of benefits and burdens, and inclusive and transparent decision making– be translated into short and long-term engineering design and planning paradigms?

  • Equity-based Infrastructure What are the physical designs, management practices, policy interventions, and community-based responses to climte ahange which best contribute to equitable resilience?

My vision is to design communitites which can adapt to a changing climate and simultaneously address fundamental inequities in the way engingineered systems serve historically marginalized communities.

in images

How can we quantify how communities transform after disruptions? How do the risk factors in a community which contribute to transformation differ from those which lead to recovery? (Nature Communications, 2021)

Climate change will drastically alter tropical cyclone behavior (how many, how strong, how much rainfall etc…). What does this mean for the US power grid? (Scientific Reports, 2020)

Warmer temperatures cause increases in electricity as individuals cool their homes. But does everyone increase by the same amount? (Scientific Reports, 2020)

All three of these networks have the same % of the network removed (in dark blue). What changes based on the spatial arrangement of the outages? (click the link to find out!)

If policymakers in a country want to reduce their environmental impact, what other countries should they look toward as examples of improvement?

When components of community resilience are tested by different types of disasters and natural hazards? How do collective community dynamics evolve in response to a hurricane vs a mass shooting?

When planning the types of electricity to produce tomorrow, how much can I count on wind and solar power to provide adaquate supply? What happens if I think it's going to be windy and it's calm?

Check back for more soon! [Updated 09/22/2020]