Climate change is the greatest crisis of our times. While we are all implicated in this disaster, in the end it is how we understand and respond to one another’s vulnerability that matters. I am a geographer, writer, and researcher committed to working toward solutions to disasters and humanity’s changing relationship with local water resources that both confront the roots of people’s vulnerability and that complement, rather than displace, local knowledge and practices.

I have 10 years of experience working independently and collaboratively with interdisciplinary teams to study the impacts of global warming and climate-exacerbated disasters on vulnerable populations in the US and across the developing world. Most of my work has been focused on human efforts to adapt to and cope with changing water resources. I have studied both floods and chronic water scarcity and the ways in which they are intensifying already radically uneven patterns of vulnerability in places like Ladakh, India and Zambia’s Zambezi River Basin. My two most extensive research projects were supported by fellowships: a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which funded my Master’s research in Nepal’s lower Karnali River Basin and a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Grant, which allowed me to spend a year in India examining efforts to build artificial glaciers across Ladakh and revitalize springs in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. Currently I serve as a consultant and project manager for the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the University of Virginia and The Resilience Adaptation and Feasibility Tool (RAFT) where I facilitate community engaged resilience planning for rural communities across Virginia impacted by climate-induced flooding as well as deeper structural vulnerabilities.