undermining risk in technical communication
Undermining risk in technical communication: Extractive industry, cascading disaster, and the global climate crisis is a collaboratively authored monograph, forthcoming with the SUNY Press Series in Technical Communication in June 2026. My co-authors, Ehren H. Pflugfelder (Oregon State University), Daniel P. Richards (Old Dominion University), Donnie Johnson Sackey (University of Texas), and I offer a historiography of risk in technical communication, identifying limitations in the spatial- and temporal-frames present within studies of risk in the field. Building on Angela M. Haas and Erin A. Clark's (2017) work, we sketch an original methodology for considering cascading diasters such as the global climate crisis. Thereafter, we apply the methodology to construct three case studies of the climate crisis in the Colorado River Basin watershed. The first case study examines the temporal relationships between U.S. colonial aspirations, Westward expansion, and the Gold King Mine spill, which impacted the Animas River. The second case study looks at the spatial relationships that contributed to the Law of the River, which has provided the legal and physical infrastructure for re-distributing water Colorado River across the American West. The final case study considers the flux and flow of risk across space and time in relation to the proposed Uintah Bain Railway project that seeks to move shale-oil through the Colorado River Basin. We close the project dialogically reflecting on the implications of this project.
nsf ascend engine in colorado and wyoming
In 2022, I was selected for the 2022-2023 cohort of the Leadership Fellows Program at Colorado State University (CSU) and assigned to work in the Office of the Vice President for Research on strategic scientific and medical communication initiatives. One flagship project from this fellowship included partnering with leaders from government, research, education, industry, economic development, tribal government, and venture capitalism to co-create a successful vision for the National Science Foundation's Regional Innovation Engines (RIE) program. The RIE proposal was a particularly exciting project to work on, as this program is designed to respond to societal grand-challenges through community-driven, use-inspired, convergent research. Drawing from my expertise in technical and scientific communication, I worked alongside of Dinaida Egan, the Director of Research Acceleration at CSU, providing strategy, building cohesive cross-sector teams with partners spanning industry, academia, and government, leveraging project management skills, and extending targeted grant writing expertise. Alongside of institutional leaders from CSU, University of Colorado, University of Wyoming, and Colorado School of Mines, our team advanced a successful $160-million proposal to accelerate the development of climate resilience technologies in Colorado and Wyoming. This applied work seeks to respond to climate crises such as aridification, wildfire, and drought increasingly threatening the region. The resulting RIE, Advanced Sensing and Computation for Environmental Decision-making (ASCEND), now functions as a "strategic testbed for high-impact, technology-driven adaptation strategies...harnessing advanced sensing, AI-driven analytics, and data-informed decision-making" (ASCEND, 2025).
smart firefighting and physiological wearables
Throughout my career as a researcher, I've had the opportunity to work on a number of applied projects funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the NSF to advance smart- and wearable-technologies for use in fire and emergency services. For example, a team of interdisciplinary collaborators at CSU and I partnered with leaders from Poudre Fire Authority (Fort Collins, CO) to host a workshop that included representatives from international, national, state, and local fire service organizations to better understand the role of technology in responding to occupational safety and health challenges in the industry. Similarly, members of our research team conducted clinical and user-experience design research to adapt a physiological wearable platform for use within arduous fireground environments and participated in the Firefighter Physiological Monitoring Technology Summit in Washington, D.C. hosted by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and Dr. Denise Smith (Skidmore College). More recently, I partnered with representatives from the Larimer County Sheriff's Office and AlertWest to explore the feasibility of implementing a pilot of an artificial-intelligence (AI) wildfire detection platform in Northern Colorado that can provide early detection of fires. Within these projects, my primary focus is designing platforms that provide inclusive and equitable access to the data and information that flow these systems, while also considering how issues such a privacy, ownership, and openness impact their usability.
