Rachel Scarlett

I'm an Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Georgia State University, where I've been working since 2023. My main area of expertise is water sciences, and I focus on examining the way that communities participate in water management across urban regions. Before joining Georgia State, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Field Museum in Chicago for a little over a year, and prior to that, I completed my PhD in Ecological Sciences and Engineering at Purdue University. In my current role, I wear many hats - it's like 5 jobs in one. I teach Environmental Science and water resources courses to a range of students from undergrad to master's level. I mentor three undergraduate students and several master's students on various research projects. My undergraduate students have been conducting an urban flooding survey around the city of Atlanta, going from house to house to ask households about their experiences with flooding and what resources they may need. I help prepare them to present their research at undergraduate student conferences. My master's students work on water quality assessments, collecting water samples in rivers near our campus and analyzing the data in my research lab. One of my master's students is leading the larger survey across Atlanta on urban flooding as part of her thesis. I've secured two grants for my research - one from Graduate Women in Science and another from the Smith Conservation Research Fellowship. I also have service responsibilities, including hosting guest speakers from other universities to come speak to our students about their research and programs. What really motivates my work are the stories I heard from my family growing up. My family is from Florida, and my parents and their siblings grew up during segregation, when Black communities could not enjoy natural spaces that other folks could go to. They lived in Daytona Beach but couldn't go to the beach that was 10 minutes from their house because it was whites only - they had to travel an hour away just to go to the beach during hot summers. Growing up hearing those stories of lack of access to nature and inequality when it comes to green space and all the benefits we receive from the Earth really motivated me to start working with communities, so that we can use science as a tool to start addressing these problems together.