Leah Campbell
Leah Campbell first became fascinated by disasters after Hurricane Katrina. That storm opened her eyes to how unnatural “natural” disasters are, sparking her interest in the relationship between social systems and the physical world that shapes them.
She majored in geology and geophysics at Yale, where she did research in seismology and earthquake risk. After college, she began grappling with the greatest disaster of all—climate change—and moved into the environmental sciences, doing fisheries research in Bristol Bay, interning with the National Park Service on shoreline change monitoring, and working for environmental nonprofits in California on projects ranging from fuels reduction to water quality and sea level rise.
She began a PhD in urban planning, focused on hazard mitigation, disaster recovery, and stormwater management, but decided that she was less interested in doing research than in communicating it. She plans to pursue a career in environmental writing to educate the public about risk and climate resilience, and to elevate the work of citizen scientists around green infrastructure, urban flooding, and environmental justice.
