By Joy Vann
With shorelines shaped by the winds and tides of the Chesapeake Bay and the Elizabeth River, ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ is uniquely situated to tell a story of transformation and adaptation. The University’s pursuit of research to promote coastal resilience — including risk assessment, infrastructure adaptation, ecosystem preservation and building community awareness and partnerships — is core to its mission as an R1 institution.
Wie Yusuf, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Public Service, has worked behind the scenes conducting vital research and at the forefront engaging students and communities affected by the changing landscape.
Her interdisciplinary research links environmental science, engineering, planning and public policy to bring academics and people living in affected communities together to discover solutions.
Dr. Yusuf came to ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ in 2008 after completing her doctoral program at the University of Kentucky. After her initial interview, the deal was sealed for her when she took a brief visit to the beach. She was sold by the 70-degree temperature and having her feet the sand in December.
Last year she received the 2025 Truitt-Felbinger Award from the American Society for Public Administration’s Section on Transportation Policy and Administration for her work that pulls research and practice together.
What is the focus of your research?
I have a lot of different research interests. I've been working in transportation policy and planning since graduate school. I worked at the Kentucky Transportation Center as a graduate research scientist, and I continued that work at ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. When major toll projects were announced around 2012, new research opportunities emerged. As a behaviorist, I study how people respond to and implement policy, so I began to study residents' willingness to pay tolls. That led to a series of research articles on public support for tolls and gas taxes to fund infrastructure improvements.
Has living in Hampton Roads influenced your research?
When I first moved here I had a six-month-old baby. We were driving home from Virginia Beach and the offramp into our neighborhood was closed because of flooding. Dumpsters were floating in the streets. This was my first introduction to flooding and it really shaped my research into sea level rise, flooding and coastal resilience.
This was at a time when ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ had just started an initiative facilitating research and education about climate and sea level rise. My research mentor, the late Larry Atkinson, an Eminent Scholar Emeritus of oceanography, said we need some social scientists and other people to help us understand the behavioral aspects of this. So, he pulled me in and that's really where my research into coastal resilience took off.
That initiative transitioned into the ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Resilience Collaborative. I led that group of about 50 faculty members from across the University to develop the plan for this collaboration with the idea being that if we want to study resilience, we can't study it in silos. We need engineers to work with policy folks and finance folks, and we need to understand the public perceptions of people's willingness to pay for different types of adaptation. That became the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience (ICAR). I’ve revived a smaller Resilience Collaborative that is focused on faculty and researchers doing work on the people, policies and places of coastal resilience.
What compelled you to pursue your varied research?
My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering which is a far cry from where I am today. As an undergrad at the University of Notre Dame, my senior design project was with a civil and chemical engineering professor who was studying acid rain. We collected rain on the roofs of buildings on campus and did an analysis that connected the content of that rain to wind and particulars in the air. That was my introduction to climate change, ozone and acid rain.
Fast forward a few years. I also worked on energy efficiency and conservation, and then I decided to get my MBA when I was involved with a technology incubator that looked at advanced manufacturing in Indiana. Again, I was thinking about how you tie technologies and innovations to creative nonprofits and startups — to get new ideas and new businesses out there. There's no real theme that kind of carries through, other than, curiosity and opportunism. Cool topics and opportunities came up, and I jumped on them.
Who is the person who most influenced your work?
Larry Atkinson was a world-renowned oceanographer and his superpower was bringing people together. He helped me become part of a team that was studying coastal resilience issues and he also helped me build my own team. I work with faculty in political science and geography. I work with faculty in engineering. I’ve worked with faculty in communications and public service and economics. What we know together is so much better and so much bigger than what we can know individually. Larry also helped me appreciate the value of those multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams and the importance of working with others.
What are you working on now?
I’m working with the Resilience, Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT) in which we work through regional planning or district commissions. I love the work that my team does with the RAFT, because again, we're recognizing that coastal resilience is a real issue on the ground, and through the RAFT, we're able to work with communities to help them assess their resilience.
We’re asking: how are they doing? What are they doing that helps with their resilience? How can we identify projects that the community thinks are important, that can be pursued to enhance or build their resilience?
I want people to think that this is a project that comes from the bottom up. It is community-driven, with guidance, facilitation and input from objective academics like myself, who are also producing concrete results on the ground.