How do people understand risk, make decisions under uncertainty, and work together to protect the health of people, animals, and ecosystems?
Environmental health challenges rarely begin as communication problems.
They emerge from complex interactions among people, animals, ecosystems, technologies, institutions, infrastructure, and everyday practices. Emerging infectious disease, wildfire, food insecurity, water quality, climate hazards, invasive species, and environmental contamination all develop within systems in which scientific knowledge, public behavior, policy, and environmental conditions continuously interact.
Communication helps determine what happens next.
People must decide whether a threat is credible, whether it applies to them, whom to trust, what action is feasible, and whether changing established behavior is worth the cost or inconvenience. Organizations must translate incomplete and evolving evidence into guidance. Communities must coordinate across agencies, professions, institutions, and social networks.
My research examines how strategic, environmental, and risk communication can help people navigate uncertainty, translate scientific knowledge into action, and strengthen the adaptive capacity of communities and institutions. Rather than asking only how should we communicate this information?, I am interested in the larger question:
What conditions allow people to understand risk and act effectively within complex environmental health systems?
A Design Ecology Perspective
Environmental health is often treated primarily as a scientific problem, while communication is treated as something that happens afterward: researchers produce knowledge, and communicators explain it.
My work challenges that separation.
Scientific evidence has limited practical value if people cannot understand it, trust its source, connect it to their circumstances, or reasonably implement the recommended behavior. At the same time, even excellent communication cannot fully compensate for environments, technologies, policies, or organizational systems that make safer actions confusing or difficult.
From a Design Ecology perspective, communication is therefore part of the environmental health system itself.
Warnings, labels, interfaces, tools, policies, extension programs, news coverage, social media, professional advice, physical environments, and interpersonal relationships all influence how people perceive and respond to risk. This approach shifts attention from simply transmitting information toward understanding the entire pathway between evidence, meaning, decision, and action. The goal is not merely awareness.
The goal is to create conditions in which people can make informed, feasible, and responsible decisions.
From Biosecurity to Risk Communication
My doctoral research provided an empirical foundation for this research program.
Using a simulated tracing agent, body and object mapping, and process analysis, I documented potential transmission pathways associated with routine backyard poultry practices. The research identified recurring transfer involving tools and equipment, footwear, egg collection, nesting-box interactions, and patterns of human movement, demonstrating how seemingly minor features of everyday environments can influence biosecurity risk. The findings revealed an important communication problem as well as a design problem.
People can understand that disease transmission is possible while remaining unable to see the specific pathways through which their own behaviors create risk. Traditional guidance may therefore communicate what people should do without adequately helping them understand why, when, or where risk occurs in everyday practice. That insight now anchors several related lines of inquiry. Together, these projects move beyond a single agricultural setting to address a broader theoretical problem:
Why does scientifically accurate risk information sometimes fail to produce safer behavior—and how can communication and design work together to close that gap?
One Health and Environmental Health
A major focus of this research program is the interconnected health of humans, animals, and environments. One Health provides a particularly useful framework because many contemporary risks cannot be understood within a single disciplinary boundary. Zoonotic disease, food production, wildlife interactions, agricultural practices, environmental contamination, and community health are shaped simultaneously by ecological conditions and human decisions. My work contributes a communication and design perspective to these questions.
The backyard-flock research, for example, examines zoonotic and agricultural risk not simply as a biological phenomenon but as an interaction among human behavior, animal care, tools, environmental design, information, and routine practice.
This perspective suggests that risk reduction can occur at multiple intervention points. Education may need to change. Tools may need to change. Environments may need to change. Guidance may need to be redesigned around actual user behavior rather than idealized procedures.
In each case, effective intervention depends on understanding how people interpret information within the context in which they are expected to act.
Risk, Trust & Decision-Making
Risk communication becomes particularly difficult when scientific evidence is complex, evolving, contested, or personally consequential. People do not evaluate risk information solely on the basis of factual accuracy. They also consider the credibility of institutions, previous experiences, cultural expectations, perceived control, social norms, competing explanations, and the practical consequences of following recommendations.
This makes trust central to environmental health communication.
My research is increasingly concerned with questions such as how organizations communicate uncertainty without undermining confidence, how communicators distinguish between persuasion and manipulation, and how recommendations can acknowledge the constraints faced by different publics. These are both strategic and ethical questions. Communication designed to influence behavior must consider not simply whether a message is effective, but whether it is truthful, transparent, culturally appropriate, feasible, accessible, and proportionate to the risk being communicated.
Research Themes
My work in environmental health and risk communication explores questions such as:
- How do people perceive and interpret environmental and public health risks?
- Why does knowledge sometimes fail to translate into protective behavior?
- How do people make decisions when scientific information is incomplete or uncertain?
- What determines whether scientific and institutional sources are considered trustworthy?
- How can invisible or abstract risks be made cognitively and practically meaningful?
- How do physical environments, tools, and technologies enable or constrain safer behavior?
- How can communication support community preparedness before crises occur?
- What role does communication play in One Health initiatives?
- How can agricultural and extension communication better reflect the realities of everyday practice?
- How do organizations coordinate information across disciplinary and institutional boundaries?
- How can communication strengthen adaptive capacity rather than simply increase awareness?
- How should communicators address uncertainty while maintaining credibility and public trust?
These questions bring together strategic communication, risk and crisis communication, environmental communication, health communication, agricultural communication, One Health, human behavior, systems thinking, and design research.
Communication Before, During & After Crisis
Risk communication is often associated with emergencies, but much of the most consequential communication occurs before a crisis begins. Preparedness depends on whether people understand threats, recognize their own vulnerability, trust relevant institutions, know what actions are available, and have the resources necessary to act.
During a crisis, communication must help people interpret rapidly changing conditions while organizations coordinate information across agencies and sectors. Afterward, communities must make sense of what happened, evaluate institutional performance, rebuild trust, and incorporate lessons into future planning.
I therefore approach risk and crisis communication as part of a larger process of community resilience and adaptation, rather than as a discrete emergency-messaging function. This creates connections between my environmental health research and my broader scholarship on community resilience, stakeholder engagement, organizational communication, and research translation.
Research Translation & Public Decision-Making
One of the recurring problems across environmental health research is the distance between scientific discovery and practical use. Scholarly publication is essential, but publication alone does not ensure that evidence reaches practitioners, policymakers, organizations, or communities in a form they can use.
My work therefore treats research translation as a strategic communication problem.
The question is not simply how to simplify scientific information. Effective translation requires understanding the audience, the decision being made, existing knowledge, cultural and institutional context, competing information, uncertainty, and the practical constraints surrounding action.
This is particularly important in environmental health, where the people expected to implement recommendations may include homeowners, farmers, animal owners, community organizations, emergency managers, health professionals, government agencies, and other stakeholders with very different experiences and priorities. Research translation must therefore be both scientifically responsible and audience-centered.
Why This Matters
Environmental risks are increasingly interconnected.
A severe storm can disrupt healthcare, transportation, food distribution, communications infrastructure, and electrical systems simultaneously. Wildfire can affect respiratory health far beyond the area that burns. Agricultural practices can influence food security, economic resilience, animal health, environmental quality, and zoonotic disease risk at the same time.
These problems do not fit neatly within disciplinary or institutional boundaries. They require scientists, public agencies, organizations, practitioners, and communities to share information and coordinate decisions across systems. Communication provides part of the connective infrastructure that makes that coordination possible.
When designed thoughtfully, communication can help people understand evidence, evaluate uncertainty, build trust, recognize their role within a larger system, and translate knowledge into meaningful action.
Current Areas of Inquiry
My current work spans several interconnected areas:
Environmental and risk communication
Examining how people interpret environmental hazards, scientific uncertainty, institutional guidance, and recommended protective behaviors.
One Health and zoonotic disease communication
Studying communication at the intersections of human, animal, and environmental health, including how everyday practices and designed environments influence disease risk.
Agricultural and food-systems communication
Exploring how scientific recommendations move through agricultural communities, extension systems, professional networks, and everyday food-production practices.
Risk visualization and invisible hazards
Investigating ways to make abstract, unseen, or difficult-to-perceive environmental risks more understandable without sensationalizing or oversimplifying them.
Community resilience and preparedness
Examining how communication contributes to collective awareness, preparedness, coordination, recovery, and adaptation.
Research translation and science communication
Developing approaches for moving scientific and technical knowledge into forms that support practical decision-making by non-specialist audiences.
Stakeholder engagement and institutional trust
Investigating the relationships among public institutions, experts, organizations, and communities during conditions of uncertainty or change.
Ethics of strategic risk communication
Examining responsibility, persuasion, transparency, uncertainty, feasibility, representation, and potential unintended consequences when organizations seek to influence protective behavior.
Together, these areas contribute to my broader Design Ecology framework, which examines how communication, behavior, technology, organizations, and environments interact within complex adaptive systems.
Looking Forward
The environmental health challenges of the twenty-first century are characterized by uncertainty, interdependence, and rapid change. Meeting those challenges requires excellent science—but science alone is not enough.
Societies must also determine how evidence becomes understandable, how uncertainty is communicated, how institutions earn trust, how communities coordinate across difference, and how recommended actions become realistic within everyday life. My research seeks to understand those processes and develop communication strategies and system-level interventions that help people, organizations, and communities recognize risk, make better decisions, coordinate action, and adapt more effectively.
Ultimately, environmental health communication is not simply about explaining science. It is about creating the conditions in which scientific knowledge can become informed, ethical, and collective action.