Urban Heterogeneity Measurements, Forecasts, and Uses

Speaker: Dr. Christa Brelsford, Research Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Hosted by: Dr. Mollie Gaines, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, FER

Summary: How do we measure connectivity in urban environments? How much heterogeneity in urban environments is to be expected? To what extent is the built environment shaped by socioeconomic processes, and vice versa? In this talk, Dr. Brelsford will present research exploring the causes, consequences, and determinants of the urban built environment and urban heterogeneity. She will describe a handful of methods useful for quantifying urban heterogeneity, present an example of a multi-objective optimization framework for describing risk along hydrologic, economic, and social dimensions, and then demonstrate an approach for quantifying trade-offs between different objectives when designing observation networks of the system.

About the speaker: Christa Brelsford is a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Previously, she was the Liane Russell Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in 2014 for research on the determinants of residential water demand. Brelsford’s core research focus is on developing empirical methods to understand interactions between human and physical systems, especially in urban contexts.