About Me

I am a first-generation Black American scholar from Dallas, Texas. Specifically, I grew up on a street named Stanley Smith Drive in the South Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. My street was perpendicular to a street named Prosperity Avenue. The irony was that nothing about my neighborhood was prosperous for the folks that resided there including my family. The neighborhood was crime ridden and drug infested with deteriorated infrastructure, pollution, and tobacco and liquor stores outnumbering the healthy food outlets. The residents lacked amenities and food outlets, but were in close proximity to several major junkyards and a city landfill. This environment made me question my community’s misfortune, my purpose and potential, and forced me to ask myself, “Why me?” Fortunately enough for me, with the help of my family and community, I was able to maintain hope and make it out of a potentially corrosive built environment. Furthermore, it was through persistence, hard work, quality decision-making, a sense of hope, and, to some degree, mere grace, that I’ve been able to position myself for a better life. However, I intuitively understand that there are groups of people that look like me and come from places like the one I consider home that may not be as fortunate as me, yet just as deserving and are depending on me to make a contribution.

My lived experiences has led to my educational and environmental career goals that focus on the transcendence of disadvantaged groups, environmental justice, and social prosperity. My education has empowered me to identify and illuminate environmental injustices and inequities in working-class communities of color and has allowed me to draw attention and change to neighborhoods like mine. I think that through environmental justice and equity there is an opportunity for folks to live in a thriving environment irrespective of class, gender, or race. Thus, my sentiments about my life and upbringing have evolved from “why me?” to “if not me, then who?”

Being a first generation college student, my lack of experience led me to believe that my best chance at making a contribution to environmental prosperity was through paramedicine and saving individual lives with ambulatory care. After successfully completing a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology and health promotion, I was encouraged to pursue graduate school in public health, which allowed me to begin thinking about population health holistically and focus on ways to reduce the need for emergency medicine. After finishing the Master’s Degree, I chose to continue into a doctoral program in Urban and Regional Sciences at Texas A&M University, where I completed a dissertation entitled, The Infrastructures of Equity and Environmental Justice. The urban planning doctoral degree has an applied focus, similar to public health, and allows me plan for communities that enrich people’s lives and reduce the need for emergency medicine. More specifically, the planning degree has allowed me to incorporate theory and methods from several disciplines including sociology, engineering, geography, and public health to address environmental issues comprehensively, and include issues of natural and technological hazards with everyday infrastructure issues that create and maintain environmental inequities across communities. The fact of the matter is that environmental research is dynamic in nature and having a course of study that is interdisciplinary and takes a systems approach is essential in being successful in fighting environmental injustices. Furthermore, having training from both public health and planning allows me to merge two disciplines that were once inextricably linked together focusing on environmental issues.

To date, I have primarily worked to understand how social processes and development patterns create hazardous human-built environments, vulnerable infrastructure, and the related risks and promising adaptation strategies related to, for example, urban stormwater management and flooding, industrial releases and explosions, and sanitary sewer overflows as matters of environmental justice. I’m an interdisciplinary scholar by trade and take a mixed-methods approach to my research that incorporates both quantitative, qualitative, and applied methods such as multiple regression, surveying, spatial mapping and analysis, in-depth interviewing, and focus groups. My work intentionally emphasizes participation and action through approaches including photography and photo voice, visual inspection, and environmental monitoring and sampling (e.g. water quality and quantity). 

My early environmental justice work began in Texas, working with the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.) and the Green Ambassadors of Furr High School — the nation’s first environmental justice high school — to develop a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure (PATI) that provides a community-based approach to assess the capacity and physical condition of stormwater and other infrastructure systems (e.g. transportation, utility poles, etc.). This application of community science was the first of its kind connecting flood risks from stormwater runoff to the infrastructure systems that are designed to provide physical protection. Since then, I’ve taken those early experiences directly to the resolute desk of the President of the United States. I served on the transition team of Presidential Candidate Joseph R. Biden, Jr. in 2020 and then went on to advise President Biden in the White House, influencing federal policy at the highest level, particularly through Executive Orders 14008 and 14096. My entire environmental justice portfolio spans working on the ground with communities from Texas, through the Carolinas, and into Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.

Lastly, I understand that true progress and change takes a lifetime and is trans-generational. I have been the beneficiary of mentoring from skilled scholars and activists and thus am witness to the importance of legacy and succession. Therefore I have been actively involved in rallying, recruiting, and mentoring first-generation and underrepresented students to be interested in environmental planning and environmental justice. With so much work to be done, we must be cognizant of those who follow us and help prepare them to continue this important work.