Our Featured Fellow for November is Dr. Christin Salley. Dr. Salley graduated with her PhD in Civil Engineering, with a concentration in Construction and Infrastructure Systems, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology this summer.

Dr. Salley has a BS in Fire Protection Engineering from the University of Maryland and an MSE in Civil Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “Enhancing Access to Emergency Management Efforts: Exposing Disparities, Detecting Needs, and Safeguarding Infrastructure,” in July 2023. This dissertation outlined and examined three particular issues within emergency response systems to enhance accessibility for those experiencing crisis events such as natural disasters. Dr. Salley focused on marginalized populations, which have a long-standing history of experiencing inequities in emergency management as it pertains to aspects such as distribution of aid, as procedural fairness, and longitudinal community impacts.

Dr. Salley joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2019. She served as the Fundraising Coordinator from 2019-2020, leading the organization of the 2020 Disaster Dash, and the Chairperson from 2020-2021. Through the programming the Bill Anderson Fund has provided, she has been able to make lifelong connections and meet research collaborators she still works with today. She attributes her current postdoctoral position to the support and opportunities provided by the Bill Anderson Fund, which generates sponsorship in collaboration with the Natural Hazards Center every year for Fellows to attend the Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop and Researchers Meeting. It was at the 2022 Researchers Meeting she was able to present her work on “Addressing Disaster Informatics Inequities: Formulating a Trade-Off Framework Between Fairness and Performance” and meet her current Principal Investigator. She is very thankful for the environment of the Bill Anderson Fund that has allowed her to grow as a researcher and provide platforms for Fellows’ work to be heard and seen in such spaces, which in her case led to a position after graduation.

Currently, Dr. Salley is a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow with the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). In this role, she is given a Science Mentor, Dr. Sabine Loos (Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering), and an AI Mentor, Dr. Lu Wang (Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering). She plans to conduct work related to community resilience and AI for augmented emergency management processes. The main focus of the work will be to address shortcomings seen in the disaster research field through enhanced: 1.) Data Collection for a Multi-disciplinary Framework, 2.) Connection Between Planning and Infrastructure, and 3.) Impact and Recovery Monitoring.

Dr. Salley’s overall research interests are at the intersection of emergency management, infrastructure systems, equity, and machine learning to assess social systems and enhance community resilience related to disasters and natural hazards.

Dr. Salley is currently on the job market for Assistant Professor positions! You connect with her on LinkedIn here.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Computational Social Science; Hazards/Disasters Research; Infrastructure Systems; Science, Technology, and Society