Assistant Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington

Professor Sameer H. Shah (he / him) is an environmental social scientist with expertise in the human dimensions of climate change vulnerability. He is an Assistant Professor of Climate Adaptation in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences at the University of Washington and holds the John C. Garcia Professorship. Dr. Shah’s research aims to understand the socio-economic and political processes by which climate change unevenly impacts people, and their water, food, and energy resources. He is especially interested in analyzing the equity, justice, and sustainability outcomes of climate adaptation and disaster response at multiple scales. Ultimately, Dr. Shah seeks to both inform adaptation planning that reduces the disproportionately larger climate risks experienced by marginalized groups, and to shape long-term policy strategies that transform the underlying systems responsible for exacerbating climate impacts. Dr. Shah directs the WATERS Collaborative (Water, Adaptation & Transformation: Equity, Resilience and Sustainability).

The DSSG Program, for Dr. Shah, is an important avenue in which applied computational and data science skills can be applied to pressing interdisciplinary problems of climate change. The DSSG Project led by Drs. Shah, Mehra, and Méndez-Barrientos will focus on changing groundwater elevation dynamics in the Colorado River Basin and its association with climate and agricultural change.