Our Featured Fellow for April 2024 is Natalie Coleman. Natalie is a PhD Candidate in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, under the construction engineering management program at Texas A&M University. She is also earning an Environmental Hazard Management Certificate from the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center.

In 2021, Natalie joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow. From 2022-2023, she served as BAF Student Council Secretary. She is a current BAF Lightning Talks (LT) committee member and was selected as a 2023 BAF LT presenter at the 2023 Natural Hazards Workshop. At this event she presented “Integrating Equity Standards in Infrastructure Management and Restoration,” which highlighted her research interests in integrating equity dimensions and data-driven solutions into infrastructure resilience. The presentation can also be seen in the Natural Hazards Center’s Making Mitigation Work webinar series. She credits BAF for connecting her with researchers from all over the country, and she is inspired by their commitment to place social justice issues at the forefront of their disciplines.

Natalie is an interdisciplinary graduate research assistant at Urban Resilience.AI led by Dr. Ali Mostafavi. She uses civil engineering, data science, and disaster research to understand how communities recover after natural hazards such as Hurricane Harvey, Winter Storm Uri, and Hurricane Ida. Her dissertation entitled “Assessing Inequities in the Recovery of Infrastructure Systems and Lifestyle Behaviors during Climate Hazard Events” examines distributional inequities of infrastructure outages and evaluates lifestyle changes. This includes quantifying system losses, promoting data transparency, and emphasizing human values in infrastructure resilience. She also examines community health and well-being issues by managing projects funded by the RAPID: Urban Resilience to Health Emergencies and Analytics for Equity. Previously, she was a graduate research fellow for the PIRE Coastal Flood Risk Reduction summer program (2022) and an undergraduate research fellow at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (2018).

For her research, Natalie has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Endowed P.E.O. Scholar Betty Cook Karrh Memorial Award, and an A&M Aviles-Johnson Fellow. She is especially proud to have received the League of Legends Alumni Award from Lyndon B. Johnson High School in her hometown of Laredo, Texas. She is appreciative of the Terry Scholarship Foundation for supporting her undergraduate degree. Natalie currently has 11 accepted journal articles in journals such as Sustainable Cities and Society, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and Natural Hazards Review. She plans to defend her dissertation in summer 2024 and is currently on the job market.

As President of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), Natalie leads the annual Susan M. Arseven Conference and oversees social, service, and scholarship opportunities. She also serves as Treasurer for the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Graduate Student Council (NHERI-GSC) and is an organizing member of the NHERI Mini-Conference. In her spare time, Natalie enjoys scrapbooking, adding to her knickknack and vinyl collections, and going to her boxing class.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: infrastructure resilience, distributional equity, household capacity, environmental health impacts, social welfare economics, data analytics, machine learning