Plenary Speaker Announced for Spring 2019 Meeting

Our plenary speaker on Thursday evening will be Jessica Whitehead, the coastal communities hazards adaptation specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant. She assists coastal users with integrating information about resilience to coastal weather and climate hazards into their decision-making processes. She is assisting with the development of public-private partnerships to improve risk communication and disaster recovery on Hatteras Island and throughout North Carolina as the state recovers from Hurricane Florence. Recently, she has also become more interested in using the arts to improve community understanding of and engagement with resilience. She was the science interpretation advisor on the RISING exhibition, which features fine art photography by photographer Baxter Miller and oral histories of coastal change in North Carolina collected by Ryan Stancil and Barbara Garrity-Blake, informed by coastal science and integrated in a multimedia experience.