Lauren Withycombe

Lauren Withycombe is a PhD student in the School of Sustainability. She has obtained her MA  degree in Sustainability and her BA degree in Spanish Literature both from Arizona State University.

During her Masters program Lauren worked as both a Teaching Assistant and a Research Assistant in the School of Sustainability.  Her research was focused primarily on sustainability education and how university programs can best educate students in sustainability problem-solving. The results of this research are two articles on competencies and education in sustainability, published in Environment Magazine and Sustainability Science, and conference presentations at 2009 Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lauren currently works as a Graduate Research Associate at the Decision Center for a Desert City II (DCDC), an National Science Foundation funded grant within the Decision-Making Under Uncertainty program. At DCDC Lauren studies water governance in the metropolitan area of Phoenix. Her current assignment and dissertation research focus on developing future scenarios of the regional water system, using participatory stakeholder workshops to inform model development, and vet and assess scenarios.

Lauren is particularly interested in catalyzing sustainability transitions in urban communities and the use of scenarios as a decision tool for communities and governments to consider future consequences of present actions. She is part of a research lab focused on sustainability transitions and has taken part in a number of different projects with community partners, such as the City of Phoenix, aimed at initiating sustainability changes at the city and neighborhood scale in Phoenix.