We’re very proud to announce the recent graduation of PhD student Haley Selsor, who successfully defended her dissertation on flood risk and equity in the Athens area in early summer. To celebrate her successful defense, we sat down with her to learn about how she got to this point in her education, what surprised her most about her research, and what’s next for her. Read the Q&A below. 

Tell me a bit about how you got to where you are today:

So I first got into research with an undergrad research program with the Urban Water innovation network that I did as an undergrad. That’s how I got connected with Dr Bledsoe. That was summer of 2020, so it was all over Zoom, but we got to hear lawyers, social scientists, engineers, hydrologists, architects, all related to urban water issues. And that really piqued my interest in interdisciplinary research.

I brought all of those things into my perspective from undergrad and engineering classes, where were very much calculations and designing infrastructure. But that program helped me realize that the infrastructure we’re designing impacts people. That it’s connected to the real world, and there are implications to those decisions. 

So that’s what sparked my interest in social sciences and engineering, and then Dr. Bledsoe was just really great and let me move forward. My research is looking at equity and flood risk. The engineering side is looking at creating better flood exposure maps and better inundation predictions based on search conditions, rather than using old, historical, outdated data. So I’m updating the maps using robust modeling approaches, and then using that to indicate who’s exposed, who’s not, under what conditions, and how can we quantify that inequity and some of those disparities, so that engineers can use it when they’re planning and designing structures.

Did any of your early experiences inform your research interests?

I was born and raised in Georgia and then came to UGA for undergrad. But I was talking with some friends about this the other week at dinner–someone asked if we’d had a childhood experience that, in retrospect, really shaped us. And I think one for me was the house I grew up in. In the backyard, there was a creek, and from where the yard was we could see the culvert under the road and the stream as it flowed into our backyard. Me and my sister would spend hours out there, just wandering in the creek. I think that really sparked my interest in water. And then in undergrad I studied agricultural engineering but with a natural resources focus. So still, a lot of soil and hydrology classes, and I remember taking natural resources engineering and then fluid mechanics. That was when I was like okay, water–that’s the thing I’m most interested in.

Did you have any mentors during your time at UGA?

I’d say mainly Dr. Bledsoe. He’s been a great mentor. 

What challenges exist in your research fields that you know that you want to untangle more?

Recently we were talking about what could be used in the benefit cost analysis (BCA). That’s how a lot of decisions get made–it usually comes down to a BCA. And we talked about the tradeoffs of reducing these social things to a single measure in order to fit them in the decision-making structure, or what it would look like to change the way we make decisions, so that we wouldn’t have to reduce everything down to numbers. 

But people like to have numbers when they make decisions, and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. And it poses the challenge of, do you adapt to fit into how things are being done, or do you try and do things in a different way?

What do you think would be a potentially different way to make decisions?

I think I just imagine a lot of stakeholder engagement and a lot of conversations—not just with the investors, but in terms of stakeholders, the public through open forums. And getting like community feedback. But that, of course, takes so much time and is not always realistic.

What was one thing about your research that surprised you?

I’d say that it was surprising when our models showed that smaller [flood] events that are happening more often caused accumulated impact [on vulnerable communities]. I presented some of that at Georgia Water Resources conference a few years ago, and then someone whoworks in communities came up to me afterwards, and was like, “That’s literally what we see with stormwater infrastructure.” I don’t know if reassuring is the right word, but it was good to know that this was a real thing that people are experiencing.

What’s next for you?

I’ll be done at the end of July, because I’ve done nine years of school straight. My brain is ready for a break. I’m ready to have some time to really reflect on my research experience and nail down what I’m most interested in moving forward.