Elizabeth Dean Hermann, Ph.D. is a cultural historian, designer and professor of Urbanism and Landscape at RISD whose research and teaching focus on cities, their culture-environment interconnectivity, gender issues and at-risk communities. For the past several decades her work has been centered in South Asia and the coastal cities of the Bay of Bengal region where climate change impacts are compounded by rapid urbanization due to rural to urban migration, conflict or environmentally-driven displacement, and competing land interests. Hermann received her PhD from Harvard where she focused on urban history and pandemic disease in the pre-modern Muslim world. She has taught at MIT, Harvard, Brown and Washington University in St. Louis. She has been Social Innovator-in-
