Last week I passed my 3 hour qualifying exam by defending a 3-part proposal for my dissertation research. My projects aim to support climate adaptation in infrastructure planning through furthering the considerations of climate model data in design and educating the next generation of civil engineers to cope with climate challenges.

I proposed three projects: Assessment and application of methods for using climate model data to plan and design resilient infrastructure (Chapter 1), Development and validation of an online questionnaire as tool to assess skills for climate change resilience in civil engineering degree programs (Chapter 2), and Conceptualizing quantitative resilience indexes for infrastructure planning and decision making (Chapter 3).

With my advancement to candidacy, all that’s left to do is to complete these projects and write my dissertation – easy right? Let’s see what I have to say about that in two years!