Kevin Smiley
Kevin Smiley
Kevin T. Smiley is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte where he is also a Core Faculty member in the School of
Data Science and a Core Faculty member in the Program in Public Policy.
My research investigates social inequalities and environmental change, especially as it
relates to disasters, place making, health, immigration, race, and social capital.
Most recently, I have been working in the field of extreme event attribution studying the
relationship between climate change and extreme weather. As a sociologist, I am
especially interested in the climate change-attributed impacts from these events, and
how people interpret and act on these data. This work led to grant funding from an NSF
CAREER grant and from an Early-Career Innovators program at the NSF National
Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). I also served as a committee member and
contributing author for a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
consensus study on the field. My research has led to considerable media coverage
including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and I have appeared on
The Weather Channel multiple times.
This work built on foundations on extreme weather and flooding during Hurricane
Harvey, work that was supported by an Early-Career Research Fellowship from the
National Academies’ Gulf Research Program. I was also named as part of a cohort of
the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers through NSF. Finally, I am
the author (with Michael O. Emerson) of Market Cities, People Cities (NYU Press,
2018).