About

I started my PhD exactly 20 years after I started high school. To state the obvious, it was not a straight line in between. I had been resisting a PhD for a while, telling myself that I had done enough school, that I was too old. At the same time, I was frustrated by the procedural constraints and scale of architectural practice. I was excited at the prospect of doing research. When I told one of my long-time mentors that I was applying, he just said, "finally."

When I visited MIT as a prospective student to meet with others in the program, I was struck by their confidence. I still didn't quite see myself in them, but after I had been there for a year or so, that started to change. I became increasingly interested in the role of the US military in adaptation, a topic that would have seemed unapproachable before. That interest had begun percolating in 2003. In an architecture class, I learned that the military had recently released a report on the impacts of climate change. If an institution like the military took this seriously, I thought others beyond the usual environmental suspects might too. This hunch eventually became the premise of my dissertation, one which I continue to examine in new forms.

When I was an editorial intern, and when I was an intern architect, it was hard to imagine that anyone would ever seek out my perspective on cities and climate change. With this circuitous path, I'm eager to share my perspective on detours, setbacks, doubts and persistence with students.

July 2026