Kristin Taylor promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
Congratulations to Dr. Taylor on her exceptional research program and her tenure and promotion!
Kristin Taylor, Ph.D., joined the Department of Political Science in August 2013 as an assistant professor. She received her doctorate from North Carolina State University in 2012, with specialization in public policy and public administration. Before arriving at Wayne State, she taught at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In her time at Wayne State, Taylor has published six articles in such highly respected journals as Administration & Society, Review of Policy Research, and Policy Studies Journal. She has also published three chapters in edited collections. In 2018, Taylor received two research grants from the National Science Foundation for studies on disaster-relief policy and infrastructure safety. Taylor's chapters appear in such outlets as Policy Press, Oxford University Press, and Taylor & Francis/Routledge.
Her piece "Bureaucratic Policymaking on Natural Hazards" was published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science (Oxford University Press, 2018), and it speaks to the quality of her work that such a young scholar be included in such a prestigious collection. Her chapter "The Politics and Governance of Mitigation" appears in The Handbook for Planning and Disaster Resilience (Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2018) - yet another highly regarded publication.
Taylor's work focuses on how risk, hazard, and disasters are managed in the United States. Her area of study encompasses policy learning, the generation of information in policy decision making and the politics of disaster policy. Analysis of disaster mitigation policy is valuable because disasters often reveal physical and social vulnerabilities in a community. For example, findings indicate that women, children, minorities and individuals on the lower end of the economic spectrum are more susceptible to the effects of a disaster and find recovery more difficult. Taylor has received funding from the Wayne State University Research Grant Program for the study, "Policy Learning after Disaster." In addition, she was awarded a grant in 2018 as principal investigator from the National Science Foundation for a research project titled, "RAPID: Constraints on Policy Learning after Disaster."
The study will explore the limits on policy-learning about disaster mitigation after a community has experienced an event. Taylor will also seek to understand why one community may be more vulnerable to a disaster than its neighbor. According to her thesis, local governments often attempt to engage in learning about how to reduce future disaster risks but find it difficult to see change enacted. Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in August 2017, provides a unique case for understanding the limits on policy learning because of the range of communities it affected. Taylor and her team will collect data through interviews with local government officials in communities affected by Hurricane Harvey. Research will focus on the types of sources a community looks to for information, whether the information received is credible and whether local government officials tend to be myopic in their approaches. Taylor received a second grant in 2018 from the National Science Foundation as co-principal investigator. The umbrella project is titled "CRISP 2.0 Type 2, Collaborative Research: Water and Health Infrastructure Resilience and Learning (WHIRL)," and is under the direction of Shawn McElmurry and Matthew Seeger. Taylor, as co-PI, will receive a $360,000 award over four years for her portion of the project.