fhoover
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Dr. Fushcia-Ann Hoover is a social-ecological urban hydrologist focused on exploring the intersections of urban stormwater hydrology, green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) and ecosystem services informed by environmental justice theory.
At SESYNC, she examines ways of incorporating equity into stormwater management planning and GSI for U.S. cities by framing her analysis within environmental justice and Black geography theories. Her current project analyzes the language and methods that city policies and plans use to place and evaluate GSI. Her mentor is Dr. Sara Meerow at Arizona State University.
While a National Academies’ postdoc at the Environmental Protection Agency (Cincinnati), she studied the relationship between ecosystem services and GSI, developing a framework to standardize the inclusion of ecosystem services when siting GSI and stormwater management planning. Her dissertation examined barriers to implementing stormwater control measures. The first part of her work consisted of comparing approaches to detecting watershed scale change in water quality and quantity monitoring from stormwater control measures (SCMs) using a paired watershed versus a single site watershed-monitoring program. While results showed that a decrease in pollutants and discharge under both programs, the paired watershed approach was likely to detect smaller significant changes in the watershed. The second component of her dissertation focused on the city of Chicago, where she investigated barriers to administering SCMs from the perspectives of the county, city, and community. She examined communication and outreach efforts, SCM placement decision-making, and interviewed Southside residents on their environmental awareness and support for environmental practices. Her work determined that SCMs were concentrated in the downtown business district and largely did not reflect the locations identified as high need for SCMs.
She earned her master's and PhD from the Interdisciplinary Ecological Sciences and Engineering program in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department at Purdue University, and holds an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of St. Thomas, MN.
Cohort: 2019
