Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning and Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering Kelsea Best was the featured guest on the College of Engineering’s Enginuity podcast hosted by College of Engineering Dean Ayanna Howard. Best discussed her interdisciplinary research on the effect of climate change on vulnerable communities.

My undergraduate background is actually in Chemical and Biological Engineering, and as part of that degree, I discovered a minor in environmental studies which really opened me up to interdisciplinary perspectives. I took an ethics of the environment class with a philosopher and I took a history of environmentalism class in the history department and all of that came together to really inform my interest in thinking about complex relationships between the environment and climate change and human well-being and society and so I went on to do my PhD in earth and environmental science which I was very fortunate that that education was also very interdisciplinary.

I was studying how climate change impacts human migration decisions in Bangladesh and as part of that I was working with psychologists and political scientists and geologists and of course, engineers. My role in that project was very much the integrator. So bringing together the different data sets, different ways of exploring this topic, so that’s kind of where I was establishing myself as a scholar is as the connector. I'm very much a believer in pulling together all the different ways of knowing that we can and finding those different pieces of truth that I think our disciplinary lenses can help us arrive at but then putting those puzzle pieces together to try to find those connections between topics.

So, now with this joint appointment, [the Department of] Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering allows me to focus on infrastructure and the built environment and how climate change and hazards interact with our built environment, and [the City and Regional Planning Section] allows me to think more about long-term adaptations, policy implications, and then bringing those together for me all with an equity lens is a really exciting space for me to start my career.

Listen to the podcast at the College of Engineering