Katelyn  McVay

Katelyn is a first-year PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences and is interested in the intersection of the built environment and environmental health with environmental justice as a central component. Her curiosity about built environment issues in the realm of public health was inspired by her upbringing in the Rust Belt, where exposure factors like brownfields and coal mines significantly contribute toward environmentally hazardous communities and injustice. Due to her background and degree in city planning, she is interested in unraveling the complexity of social and environmental risks using community-based participatory action and public policy applications within environmental exposure science. Katelyn has specialized in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within research, governmental, and private practice settings using a combination of spatial statistics, interactive visualization models, remote sensing, and software development to study spatial-temporal interactions between humans and the environment.

Katelyn's background in interdisciplinary environmental sciences has guided her collaborations on projects relating to air quality, climate change, heat islands, urban farming, and green/ blue spaces. Currently, she is mainly focused on how community-led research and interventions can glean local insight into pertinent environmental issues at the neighborhood scale. She also connects her excitement for mapping through developing interactive spatial tools that can convey research findings to community members and organizations for policy development.