Pamlico County, 2026

One of my core projects this summer was a qualitative research study built on interviews with PCDRC's community partners, which included organizations and individuals involved in disaster recovery across the county, including local nonprofits, faith communities, health clinics, and county agencies. Working with a graduate student collaborator, Reva Panda, I helped conduct and code these interviews using the RADaR method, an approach to qualitative analysis that emphasizes rigor and transparency in how raw interview data becomes structured findings. We conducted 21 interviews during our time in the county with leaders across several sectors, including county leadership, NGOs, and clinical settings.

What I learned: how to create an interview guide, how to translate open-ended conversations into structured research findings

I helped build out a mold documentation project designed to produce qualitative narratives PCDRC could use in grant applications. This involved developing a call list to identify and prioritize potential participants, then designing an interview guide covering symptom history, severity, and contributing environmental factors. I revised the guide significantly based on faculty feedback. I made a deliberate choice to include households that PCDRC had told they could not repair, because their experience captures a part of the recovery story that's often left out.

What I learned: how to design interview materials that get honest and usable answers without leading the respondent, and how important empathy is in community-based research

Over the past few years, SRT has been working closely with PCDRC to develop its one-of-a-kind mitigation evaluation framework. The design of the study is to compare repaired homes by PCDRC with those that have not been repaired yet by PCDRC to identify whether mitigation repairs (repairs before storms) lessen the severity of damage after storms. With the backbone of this project mostly done by previous SRT, I worked on the step-by-step guide for future research teams to match homes and evaluate the damage after storms.

What I learned: how important it is to understand the work that previous teams have done in the area of the fieldwork, and how to apply RStudio skills in the real world

Behind the interview work was a lot of background coordination. I fixed overlapping household datasets from multiple prior SRT cohorts, cleaned and de-duplicated records, and worked closely with PCDRC staff to make sure the data reflected what was actually happening on the ground. I regularly checked in with PCDRC staff members to verify records and troubleshoot inconsistencies. My goal was to compile information across several files into a centralized database to ease operations and outputs for SRT and PCDRC.

What I learned: how important centralized data is, and how to communicate with community organizations about their needs