![\"Portrait\"](\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/916\/NewFaculty_KLewis-364x408.jpg\")
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Kristy Lewis\u2019 latest title is \u201cAssistant Professor of Oceanography.\u201d Pretty straightforward, right? Lewis\u2019 path to GSO, however, wasn\u2019t so linear. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve lived like 15 lifetimes,\u201d she says and laughs. \u201cSo it\u2019s hard to put it all into one statement.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Lewis spent childhood summers fishing in sunny Florida. Her post-college days found her in much chillier Alaska, doing data science alongside commercial fishers. She returned to her high school to teach science, all while pursuing a limited-residency Masters in Environmental Studies at Prescott College. To earn her Ph.D. at Louisiana State University, Lewis studied the impacts of habitat loss on food webs.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the Lewis Lab, which strives to center \u201chistorically excluded perspectives\u201d in the field of coastal ecology by uniting researchers from diverse backgrounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a queer woman in STEM fields, and inclusion and belonging is just a crux of who I am as a researcher, as a mentor, and as a teacher and as a professor,\u201d Lewis says.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019d be fruitless to force Lewis\u2019s colorful life experience into a rigid shape or outline\u2014that would oppose the openness at the very center of her scientific ethos and practice. For Lewis, \u201ctransdisciplinary oceanography\u201d is not only a methodology, but a way forward. <\/p>\n
\u201cTransdisciplinary science centers not only interdisciplinary work but it also centers the community, and other ways of knowing beyond western science,\u201d Lewis says. It\u2019s a comprehensive way of \u201cthinking about how we can collaborate across difference and discipline to solve some of these wicked or complex problems in the coastal ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Lewis\u2019 case, the modeling she\u2019s used throughout her career is put toward more applied ends in a transdisciplinary approach. It\u2019s a philosophy that aims to be all-encompassing and precise, and it\u2019s not for cookie-cutter thinkers\u2014or the antisocial. Lewis notes that, when it comes to transdisciplinary research, \u201cthe biggest challenge is communication.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lewis\u2019 example? \u201cWhen you\u2019re thinking about a problem like sea level rise or increasing ocean temperatures, we all know those things impact all of us,\u201d she says. \u201c[But] when you sit in a room with a social scientist, an engineer, and an archaeologist, and people with a whole different type of vocabulary\u2026we generally don\u2019t think about \u2018How do we identify the problem and think about the solutions collectively?\u2019 And a lot of people get turned away very quickly if you\u2019re not truly trained and you\u2019re not thoughtful.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not even mentioning the other key aspect of transdisciplinary work\u2014collaborating with communities to generate relevant and actionable research. Communities have often been an \u201cafterthought\u201d in western science, Lewis says. But imagine a park that frequently floods due to rising sea levels. How could an oceanographer, a landscape architect and an engineer redesign the park in a way that serves the community again?<\/p>\n
At GSO, Lewis hopes to inspire students to understand and employ a transdisciplinary mindset that could solve such quagmires. As of this writing Lewis was unsure exactly which courses she\u2019ll be teaching. Yet she\u2019s definitely eager to design and teach a Grand Challenge course on transdisciplinary oceanography. <\/p>\n
For Lewis, her latest local landscape is fortuitously compact: \u201cWe cannot address[\u2026]horizontal problems with vertical solutions. We cannot be in a silo just studying biological oceanography,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s where the social science and the economic aspects come into play. Honestly, I can\u2019t imagine a better place to do that kind of work than here in Rhode Island.\u201d <\/p>\n
And so begins another lifetime for Kristy Lewis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kristy Lewis, Assistant Professor of Oceanography By Alexander Castro Kristy Lewis\u2019 latest title is \u201cAssistant Professor of Oceanography.\u201d Pretty straightforward, right? Lewis\u2019 path to GSO, however, wasn\u2019t so linear. \u201cI\u2019ve lived like 15 lifetimes,\u201d she says and laughs. \u201cSo it\u2019s hard to put it all into one statement.\u201d Lewis spent childhood summers fishing in sunny […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,1987],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aboard-gso","category-publications"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182866"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184628,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182866\/revisions\/184628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}