Professor Seth Guikema has always been passionate about the environment — about water, about science. It was combining and pursuing those interests that led him to a career in environmental engineering and risk management. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in Environmental Engineering, he then went on to continue his engineering education at…
Professor Seth Guikema has always been passionate about the environment — about water, about science. It was combining and pursuing those interests that led him to a career in environmental engineering and risk management. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in Environmental Engineering, he then went on to continue his engineering education at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand while on a Fulbright scholarship. Guikema also obtained both his master’s and Ph.D from Stanford University where he completed his Ph.D in Engineering Risk and Decision Analysis. Guikema has worked in risk and resilience analysis in both academia and industry Prior to his position at the University of Michigan, he served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and as an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is also a faculty member at the University of Stavanger in Norway. While Guikema is not a newcomer to U-M, previously splitting his time between CEE and Industrial and Operations Engineering, he will now be shifting the bulk of his attention to his work at CEE.
While much of Guikema’s work revolves around risk and resilience analysis and management, he brings to CEE a much broader and interdisciplinary array of experiences.
“A lot of my work is grounded in risk and resilience,” Guikema said. “But it’s also at the intersection of civil engineering, environmental engineering, and urban planning. We focus on risk resilience in a broader, more interdisciplinary way. For example, centralized infrastructure is one of the ways in which we get critical services, like power, water, sewer, communications, etcetera. But we want to look beyond that and ask about the community at large: What do they need access to? What does the community structure look like? How does it change after a hazard? And this, increasingly, is intersecting with urban planning.”
In addition to his teaching experience and research interests, Guikema will be greatly contributing to CEE’s growth through his participation in the department’s new Hazard, Risk and Resilience Program, an upcoming degree specialization for which he will serve as the master’s advisor. “ It very much aligns with my research,” Guikema said. “ I will be teaching two of the
five core Ph.D classes, spatial modeling and risk analysis, and advising and co-advising PhD students.”
With the nature of his work being so interdisciplinary and constantly expanding, Guikema hopes to continue engaging with other U-M departments for collaborative projects revolving around hazard risk management and analysis, as he has done in the past as well as his broader interests including autonomous vehicle risk and safety, forced labor and human trafficking, and supply chain resilience.
“Interdisciplinary collaborations are increasingly critical as we try to address the resilience of communities and systems moving forward in a changing climate,” Guikema said. “For example, I’ve collaborated with faculty in the School for Environment and Sustainability and the Department of Communications and Media in LSA. Recently, I’ve been writing proposals with demographers to study population movements. To me, that’s what we need to be doing in hazards – collaborating widely and across disciplines.”
While at CEE, Guikema hopes to include not only other U-M departments in his work but CEE students as well.
“I try to engage students very much in research,” Guikema said. “Mentoring students and involving them in research is one of the things that keeps me in academia. I work very closely with a lot of Ph.D students, engaging them in challenging interdisciplinary projects. I also have involved quite a few undergraduates in research and worked with them in various ways, sometimes in larger teams and sometimes individually.
To me, a big part of student engagement is getting them involved in research, helping them learn how to do research and allowing them to gain that experience.”
Along with student engagement and participation in research, Guikema also intends to maintain a focus on DEI principles in his classroom. “A lot of my research is focused on inequalities and inequities — how different communities are impacted by hazards and the differences in their access to resources,” Guikema explained. In terms of teaching, I bring this into the classroom through case studies that highlight the sorts of issues of injustice in risk analysis — who bears what risks relative to who gets the benefits of them? Overall, I think we need a lot more quantitative analysis and understanding of those patterns, and we’re increasingly doing a lot of work in that space.”
As he turns more of his attention to CEE, Guikema looks forward to continuing to work on projects involving community resilience. “Civil engineers tend to focus on infrastructure,” Guikema explained. “That’s an important part of the picture, but it’s certainly not all of it.
Focusing more on community recovery — what households actually need to return to some sense of normalcy — is integral as well. That goes beyond infrastructure; it involves institutions that are an important part of the social fabric.”
Above all else, what most excites Guikema about his future at CEE is the opportunity to continue building relationships with the future generation of civil and environmental engineers.
“For me, the thing that I’m most proud of is my students and the success my students have had,” Guikema said. “The students, the Ph.D students, they’re a major reason why I stay in academia. They’re what I’m most proud of.”
Listen to our podcast conversation with Guikema here: