NewsSeptember 2022
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Disaster. Environment. Community. Inequality. Organization.Michelle Meyer is the Director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center and an Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning Department at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University (CSU) under Dr. Lori Peek. She earned her BA from Murray State University in Murray, KY in Sociology and a MA from CSU in Sociology.
Michelle's research interests include disaster resilience and mitigation, environmental sociology and community sustainability, and the interplay between environmental conditions and inequality. Particularly, Michelle studies how disaster and environmental settings intersect with social structural forces that maintain or transform inequality. Michelle's research projects include understanding capacity of long-term recovery organizations, nonprofit efforts in resilience, disaster risk perception, social capital in disaster resilience, organizational energy conservation, volunteer training program evaluation, evaluation of disaster response plans for individuals with disabilities, social media use among vulnerable populations, how to increase protective action knowledge in Haiti, citizen science protocols for measuring storm-water condition equity, and environmental attitudes and behaviors. Michelle's work has evolved to include collaborating regularly in large interdisciplinary teams. Her collaborators include experts in various engineering fields - especially civil, environmental, and structural - anthropology, archeology, public health, computer science, agricultural economics, public administration, landscape architecture, and of course sociologists. Her teaching expertise most centrally lies in research methods including introductory statistics, research design, and qualitative methods. She also teaches speciality courses in disaster, environmental sociology, social stratification, and community. She implements mechanisms for undergraduate and graduate student involvement in research - with a focus on historically excluded students - that supports their education and helps communities become more resilient. She has traveled across the US and world to collect data, including all around Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Colorado, New York, California, North Carolina, as well as Sri Lanka and Haiti. She has conducted survey research throughout the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines and in Peru, India, and Turkey. She aims to be an engaged scholar. She accomplishes this through collaborations with nonprofit and governmental organizations on applied research including t.e.j.a.s. (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Service), GeoHazards International, local long-term recovery organizations, Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), the Texas General Land Office, Texas Division of Emergency Managemange, as well as with high school students from Houston ISD. *All pictures and posters on this website are property of Michelle, please ask before using. 
Michelle and her dissertation adviser Dr. Lori Peek at her dissertation defense, May 2013.
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