Interdisciplinary Research Statement

Throughout my time as a Media and Communications Studies student, I have developed my ability to conduct research that draws on multiple fields and synthesizes diverse sources into cohesive arguments. Three artifacts from my coursework illustrate this growth: a research paper on threats to the American power grid, a climate-change case study on the 2021 Texas winter storm, and an independent research report on procurement inefficiencies at Sound Transit. Taken together, these works demonstrate my capacity to formulate research questions, locate and evaluate sources across disciplines, and present findings to a general audience.

My research paper, written for BWRIT 135, Research Writing, investigated existential threats to the U.S. power grid, including cyberattacks, geomagnetic storms, and extreme weather events. The paper required me to navigate databases such as Academic Search Complete, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and the Gale Virtual Reference Library, adapting my search terms as I moved between cybersecurity literature, space-weather research, and energy-policy analysis. In the paper, I traced how the 2010 Stuxnet worm attack on Iranian centrifuges demonstrated that even air-gapped industrial control systems are vulnerable, and I connected that finding to Russia’s 2015 cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid, in which operators watched helplessly as breakers were thrown remotely, leaving 230,000 people without power. I then pivoted and explained how coronal mass ejections caused the 1989 collapse of Québec’s grid in under ninety seconds and how a Carrington-scale event today could cause up to two trillion dollars in damage. By taking these disparate threads, together with political analysis of how energy-industry lobbying stalled protective legislation, the paper modeled the kind of cross-disciplinary synthesis that interdisciplinary research demands.

My final essay for BEARTH 155, Climate Science, built on those research skills by applying them to a focused case study: the February 2021 Texas Winter Storm. In that essay, I drew on climate science to explain how Arctic warming destabilizes the polar vortex and pushes frigid air southward, on engineering literature to show how an isolated, deregulated grid failed when over 30 GW of generating capacity went offline, and documented how Black and Hispanic communities suffered disproportionate mortality and economic loss. This artifact demonstrates my ability to position a single event within multiple analytical frameworks—climatology, infrastructure engineering, and social equity—and to write for a general audience that may not share expertise in any one of those fields.

My latest project, “Problems in Mass Transit Procurement: Sound Transit,” was my most ambitious undergraduate undertaking. Drawing from NYU Marron Institute’s seminal Transit Costs Project, The Urbanist, and other comparative studies from global cities, I analyzed why North American and specifically Sound Transit has such high procurement costs per mile compared to the global standard. Specifically, mistakes have been made in state legislation, governance, design, and construction. From locally elected board members steering design, leading to wildly inefficient political micromanagement, defensive overdesign of stations, to weakness to outside stakeholders, leading to expensive concessions and redesigns. I have synthesized this to show that it’s structure, not labor or construction materials, that have driven Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail’s excessive costs.

Across these three projects, a consistent set of research competencies emerges: the ability to search for and evaluate sources across disciplinary boundaries, to synthesize technical material into accessible prose, and to connect specialized findings to broader social and political contexts. Each artifact also reflects growth in my comfort with complexity and ambiguity—from my paper on the grid, through a structured case study, to an independent comparative analysis that I have just completed. Together, they demonstrate that I can think critically and creatively across areas of knowledge, pursue questions with appropriate methods and sources, and present results in forms suited to my audience.