Friday Fellow Feature: Judanne Lennox-Morrison

Our featured fellow for August 2026 is Judanne Lennox-Morrison, who will be graduating this month with a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Sciences from Texas A&M University. Dr. Lennox-Morrison received a master’s degree in Urban Planning from Texas A&M and a bachelor’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Technology, Jamaica. Her academic research lies at the intersection of collaborative radical planning, hazard mitigation, community development, and spatial geographies of race.

Judanne has worked for more than eight years as an urban planner and emergency manager. Her earlier years were spent in local planning authorities developing planning policy and assessing subdivision hazard risk across the country in Jamaica. She later moved to Jamaica’s National Disaster Office, where her tasks were primarily mitigation planning, operational readiness, and community preparedness. She supported the organization through many hydrometeorological and technological events. Judanne sharpened skills like project management, grant management, geographical analysis, and training and facilitation, which subsequently became a significant focus of her doctoral research.

As a culturally responsive evaluator, Judanne uses program evaluation as a critical feature of her feminist participatory action research methods. Drawing on perspectives from sociology, urban planning, public health, and environmental justice literature, Judanne uses an intersectional approach to long term community resilience that prioritizes collaboration, training, and meeting communities where they are. Her dissertation explores the role of Community Emergency Response Teams—local preparedness training programs—in rural places, and specifically Black and Tribal places.

Judanne joined the BAF in the 2020-2021 cohort and has been a Fellow for six years. She currently serves as a member of the BAF Writing Committee. From 2024-2025 she served as BAF Student Council Chairperson. Prior to that, she served in chair positions for both the Writing Committee and Fundraising Committee from 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 respectively. Judanne has also served as research assistant on multiple Bill Anderson Fund projects with grantees of the Margaret Cargill philanthropies, including Feeding America and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD). She has served as a panelist, session organizer and presenter at the Natural Hazards Workshop for multiple years. She is a member of the American Sociological Association, Association of American Geographers, American Planning Association and American Collegiate Schools of Planning.

In her free time Judanne enjoys reading, cooking, traveling and spending long days at the beach.