Bethany Gordon
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Washington
Bethany Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. She specializes in applications of behavioral science and psychology to improve design processes for a more equitable built environment. Her research also focuses on climate justice and addressing designer positionality (i.e., framing assumptions, stakeholder perspective-taking) in large-scale infrastructure design. Designers’ perceptions of the world shape the decisions they make and, in turn, the decisions they make determine how the next generation perceives the world. This is problematic in a system where designers profess objectivity, but in reality, are subject to prejudice and bias like everyone else. Dr. Gordon's goal is to find ways to disrupt these behavioral systems by uncovering the biases that most affect designers’ ability to create in ways that align with equity and climate justice. As an interdisciplinary researcher, working across subdisciplines of civil engineering and behavioral science, she aims to increase knowledge about how individuals or teams: 1) conceptualize collective identities in increasingly diverse spaces, 2) can overcome the environmental cues that restrict inclinations for equitable and resilient decision-making, and 3), can leverage climate adaptation to remediate past harms enacted by the built environment.