2025-26 Global Change Research Fellow

PhD Student, Environmental Design, College of Design
Advisor: Dr. Traci Rose Rider

About You

What do you study?
My research examines how design and the built environment can promote health in communities facing recurrent climate-induced risks, particularly focusing on hurricane-prone regions. I center the lived experiences of residents in these high-risk environments, examining their capacity to access and protect resources necessary for well-being. This approach treats contemporary built environments as cumulative outcomes of past disaster recovery and rebuilding efforts. The core premise of my work is that a community’s baseline health is a strong predictor of resilience to future hazards. This baseline reflects whether previous disruptive events, such as hurricanes, were used to meaningfully address underlying vulnerabilities or whether those vulnerabilities were carried forward and compounded over time. In examining how people experience their environments today, my research aims to identify both the progress made through recovery efforts and the persistent blind spots that continue to shape health and well-being in hazard-prone communities.

What influenced you to go into this field of study?
 I hold both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, which means I have long been engaged with questions about the built environment. Over time, I developed a strong interest in behavioral design, especially how design can shape, constrain, and enable human behavior. Through professional experience working with clients on building projects, I became increasingly aware of the gap between the intentions embedded in designed spaces and the value ultimately experienced by users. This interest culminated in my master’s capstone project, where I designed a drug addiction treatment center informed by research on how architectural design can support healing and recovery. That project sharpened my desire to understand how design can promote health for populations that are often excluded from conventional health-promoting environments. When I decided to pursue doctoral studies, I wanted to extend this line of inquiry beyond individual buildings to larger contexts. My focus on hazard-prone environments follows this same rationale. These are settings where disruption is routine rather than exceptional, where residents often live with sustained uncertainty, and where cycles of recovery and preparation frequently overlap. My work is driven by a desire to explore how we can go beyond survival-thinking to designing for health in fragile, high-risk, and transitional environments, particularly where vulnerabilities and stressors may compound over time.

What do you think is the most pressing issue related to global change?
 The most pressing issue related to global change is learning to live with climate risk even as we work to slow climate change. Mitigation alone won’t protect the communities already experiencing recurrent disasters; we need to simultaneously address the structural conditions that create vastly different experiences of climate induced hazards. We often treat disasters as equalizing forces, but the reality is that hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and other natural hazards reveal and can deepen existing inequities. The built environment plays a central role in this: decisions about who can build and live where, how we allocate recovery resources, and whose needs shape rebuilding priorities eventually determine who is protected and who remains vulnerable. My concern is that without confronting these structural issues, even well-intentioned climate adaptation will leave the most vulnerable behind.

About Your Research

What results are you finding?
One key insight from my research is that health exists on a continuum, and truly supportive environments are those that enable people to achieve their desired functioning regardless of where they fall on that continuum. This shifts the design question from ‘how do we build for the average healthy person?’ to ‘how do we create environments that support diverse capacities and needs by default?’ Additionally, in recent research on community support for government-led Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as climate adaptation strategies, my colleagues and I found that awareness of climate risks alone does not explain why some communities embrace NbS while others do not. Instead, two factors proved more important: people’s belief in the effectiveness of the proposed solution and their perception of their own capacity to use and benefit from it. This suggests that climate adaptation efforts need to focus not just on communicating risks, but on building trust in solutions and ensuring communities see themselves as capable beneficiaries, not just passive recipients.

Who will benefit from your research?
Most directly, it’s for residents of hazard-prone areas whose lived experiences and needs should shape how we think about climate adaptation and health promotion. Practitioners in the built environment (architects, urban planners, landscape architects) can use these insights to move beyond conventional design approaches that assume stable conditions and ‘average’ users. The research offers frameworks for designing environments that support health and well-being even in contexts of ongoing disruption and uncertainty. Policymakers and climate resilience professionals may find this work useful in rethinking how recovery resources are allocated and how success is measured. Finally, this research contributes to broader scholarly conversations about disaster resilience and health, which may be relevant to other communities grappling with recurrent risks beyond climate-induced hazards.

How would you describe your research to a 3rd grader?
Sometimes big storms called hurricanes knock down houses and flood neighborhoods. After the storm is over, people have to fix everything and build again. I study whether we are building things back in a way that helps everyone stay healthy or whether we keep making the same mistakes over and over. It is kind of like if you kept tripping over the same toy on your floor. The smart thing would be to move the toy, not just keep getting a Band-Aid each time you fall! I talk to people who live in places where hurricanes happen a lot, and I ask them about their neighborhoods: Can they get to a doctor easily? Do they have a safe place to go when it is really hot? Can they get healthy food? Because here is the thing: if people are already having a hard time staying healthy before a hurricane comes, the storm is going to be even worse for them. And if we do not fix those problems when we rebuild, the next storm will be bad in the same ways. So, my job is to figure out how we can design environments that help everyone stay healthy and strong, especially in places where big storms keep coming back.

About Your Global Change Research Fellow Experience

How do you expect the SE CASC Global Change Research Fellows Program to impact you and your work?
The program’s focus on science communication will strengthen my ability to translate research into actionable insights for practitioners and policymakers—critical for research that aims to influence real-world design and recovery policies. Engaging with fellows from different disciplines will expand my methodological approaches and help me see connections between my work and other areas of climate research. Finally, the program’s network will expose me to communities and practitioners doing innovative climate adaptation work across the Southeast. 

What advice would you give to a student that is interested in getting involved in your field?
Every place we build or rebuild shapes not just walls and roads, but the health and well-being of the people who inhabit it. If you want to work in this field, start by asking yourself how environments influence human health, behavior, and resilience, especially in communities facing repeated challenges. The communities facing these challenges are not problems to be solved; they are experts in their own context. Listen carefully to people, and pay attention to the small details that often get overlooked in design or policy. Cultivate knowledge across disciplines—architecture, planning, environmental science, and public health—because meaningful solutions rarely come from a single perspective. Above all, remember that true impact comes from designing with people, not just for them.

What has been the most rewarding part or your favorite part of being a SE CASC Global Change Research Fellow?
The December field intensive has been the most rewarding part so far. Visiting communities and sites where climate adaptation work is actively underway brought the challenges and possibilities to life. What moved me most was seeing the ingenuity of communities developing solutions grounded in their own contexts and needs. It reinforced the core premise of my research: that effective adaptation must center local knowledge, not impose one-size-fits-all solutions. Meeting the people doing this work reminded me concretely why this research matters beyond academia.

Learn more about the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Global Change Research Fellows program.

This post was originally published in SE CASC.