Friday Fellow Feature: Dr. Wendell Grinton, Jr.

Our Featured Fellow for June 2024 is Dr. Wendell Grinton, Jr., who successfully defended his dissertation on April 30th and received a doctoral degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech. He also earned a graduate certificate in Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM). His doctoral research focused on ways to improve the communication of civil infrastructure messages to the public.

In 2021, Dr. Grinton, Jr. joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow. He has served on the Writing committee and has helped create the 10-Year Anniversary installment of the annual BAF Legacy Magazine. He credits BAF for helping him to continue to navigate and explore the disaster resilience and risk management space to better understand how we can help federal agencies develop accessible and actionable alerts to communicate critical emergency response information to the public.

Dr. Grinton, Jr. was a graduate research assistant in the Society, Technology, Infrastructure, and Learning Environments (STILE) lab led by Dr. Frederick Paige. His research employs interdisciplinary approaches to tackle the vexing issues of accessibility and message framing in policy, traffic safety, and emergency response. Specifically, he historically analyzed energy policy from 1978-2022 and measured the accessibility of each policy to identify ways in which federal agencies can optimize best practices to communicate the main points of energy policy. Dr. Grinton, Jr. also analyzed the cognitive data of Virginia drivers’ perceptions of non-traditional traffic safety messages to identify potential messages that can be impactful in influencing safer driving behaviors. Lastly, he applied deep learning models and a two-round qualitative coding analysis to measure the predicted sentiment and emotion in FEMA’s Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) and Hurricane Harvey tweets to develop insights that can help alerting officials better design the language they use in FEMA’s templated WEAs. Since Dr. Grinton, Jr. has passed his dissertation defense, he has accepted a full-time position with the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstration.

For his research, he has been awarded the 2022-2023 Outstanding Doctoral Student for the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, a 2-year National Science Foundation fellowship through the DRRM program, the Lt. General Julius Becton, Jr. scholarship, an American Flood Coalition fellowship, the Davenport Leadership fellowship, the Dr. Fred J. Long, Jr. Scholarship, along with a plethora of top three finishes in research poster and PowerPoint presentation competitions. He is especially proud to have received the first-ever Lt. General Julius Becton, Jr. scholarship, as this scholarship was created in dedication to the first African-American director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Wireless Emergency Alerts, WEAs, driver behavior, neuroimaging, non-traditional traffic safety messages, fNIRS, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, prefrontal cortex, network analysis, sentiment analysis, emotion classification, policy analysis, accessibility, message design, energy efficiency, behavior modification, marginalized populations