Drawing from several fields, including meteorology, environmental anthropology, decision sciences, community engagement, data visualization, human factors, and natural hazards research, our interdisciplinary team is focused on improving interpretations of hurricane forecast products among different user groups, in particular vulnerable populations in South Florida.
Barbara Millet, PhD is faculty of Cinema & Interactive Media at the School of Communication. Her research focuses on the impact of visual and auditory elements on information processing of interactive media, psychophysiological measures as indicators of cognitive and emotional response to interactive media, and the design of user interfaces and their influences on human performance and engagement.
She is also Director of the University of Miami User Experience Lab, an academic-based research facility that supports interdisciplinary research on understanding how people use information systems.
Sharan Majumdar, PhD is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at RSMAS. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Cambridge University.
Together with his research staff and students, he explores the predictability of tropical cyclones, including sensitivity diagnostics, ensemble prediction, optimizing current and future observing systems, and data assimilation. He is also a prominent working group member of national and international organizations, including the World Meteorological Organization.
Scotney Evans, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Psychological Studies in the School of Education and Human Development. He teaches and advises students in the undergraduate program in Human and Social Development, the master’s program in Community and Social Change, and the PhD program in Community Well-being.
He is a community psychologist and community-engaged researcher working to understand and support the role of community-based organizations, networks, and coalitions in building collective power to promote community wellbeing, social change, and social justice. Dr. Evans is also the editor of the online journal Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice.
Alberto Cairo, PhD is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism and an Associate Professor at the University of Miami and the director of the visualization program at UM’s Center for Computational Science. He is the author of the books How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information (W.W. Norton, upcoming Fall 2019), The Truthful Art: Data, Maps, and Charts for Communication (PeachPit Press, Pearson Education 2016), and The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (PeachPit Press, Pearson Education 2013). He has taught at UM since 2012, after a long career as a director of visualization and infographics at news publications in Spain and Brazil. He is also a permanent visualization consultant for companies and institutions such as Google and the Congressional Budget Office.
Kenny Broad, PhD has participated in extreme scientific and filmmaking expeditions on every continent to gather information and samples that shed light on little-known environmental and cultural subjects. Broad and the late Wes Skiles received the National Geographic Explorer of the Year award in 2011.
He regularly collaborates with ecologists, climatologists, hydrologists, psychologists, and a range of other strange ‘-ologists’ and has published dozens of scientific articles on topics ranging from risk perception to venomous snakes to natural resource management.
He is currently a professor at the University of Miami where he directs the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. He is also co-director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University.
Brian is a senior research associate in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and has been involved with tropical cyclone research for over two decades. Much of his work is focused on model simulations and model verification of tropical cyclones, but has also included topics such as satellite remote sensing, hurricane risk perception, and the economic value of improved hurricane forecasts.
Brian is enthusiastic about communicating science with the general public. He has maintained a blog focused on tropical cyclone activity since 1996 for which the general public has always been the intended audience. In 2014 he co-founded a public outreach program on hurricanes at the Rosenstiel School and continues to mentor the graduate students who deliver the presentations.
