McAdoo, Brian
Brian McAdoo
Dr. Brian McAdoo researches the impacts of natural disasters on communities and how human impacts on the environment impact community resilience to natural disasters. His research seeks to inform community resilience by analyzing the effects of disasters triggered by natural hazards and how human-environment and geohazards interact. He is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Earth and Climate Science Division at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Dr. McAdoo is also the head of the PlanetLab at Duke University. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Alpine Fault in New Zealand and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied submarine geomorphology. Dr. McAdoo studies geohazards in the South Pacific, Asia, and the Caribbean.
“In my opinion, image and money are not as important as doing something you love for a career. I would do my job for free” - Brian McAdoo, 2005.
van Gevelt, T., McAdoo, B. G., Yang, J., Li, L., Williamson, F., Scollay, A., Lam, A., Nok Chan, K., & Switzer, A. D., 2023. Using virtual simulations of future extreme weather events to communicate climate change risk, PLOS Climate, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000112
Sudmeier-Rieux, K., Arce-Mojica, T., Roehmer, H. J., Doswald., N., … McAdoo, B. G., et al., 2021). Scientific evidence for ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction, Nature Sustainability, 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00732-4
Hao, L., Ambujendran, R., Van Westen, C. J., Sajinkumar, K.S., Martha, T. R., Jaiswal, P. & McAdoo, B. G. 2020. Constructing a complete landslide inventory dataset for the 2018 monsoon disaster in Kerala, India, for land use change analysis. Earth System Science Data, 12(4), pp. 2899-2918. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2899-2020,
Sudmeier-Rieux, K., McAdoo, B. G., Devkota, S. & Chandra, P. 2019. Invited perspectives: Mountain roads in Nepal at a new crossroads. Natural Hazards & Earth System Science, 19(655). http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/nhess-19-655-2019
McAdoo, B. G., Quak, M., Gnyawali, K., Adhikari, B. R., Devkota, S., Rajbhandari, P. L. & Sudmeier-Rieux, K. 2018. Roads and landslides in Nepal: How development affects environmental risk. Natural Hazards & Earth System Science, 18(12). http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-3203-2018
Brian McAdoo grew up in Pittsburgh but spent his summers in rural North Carolina, where his father grew up. “Having that summer experience outside – playing all day every day, walking around in creeks and swamps and field – gave me a certain love and appreciation for the outdoors I would not have gotten in the city,” he says (2016).
Dr. McAdoo attended Duke University for his undergraduate studies. However, Dr. McAdoo did not start with the intention of becoming a geologist or even a scientist; he was initially an economics major. After taking a geology class as his science requirement, Dr. McAdoo fell in love with the subject and switched his major. However, his primary concern was finding a career where he could make money, and for a geologist, that meant pursuing a career in the oil industry. Dr. McAdoo has several summer jobs in the oil industry during college, including one as an exploration geologist for a natural gas exploration company in West Virginia and another at a Shell offshore operation in Louisiana.
Dr. McAdoo graduated from Duke in 1987, and in 1991, he received a Fullbright Scholarship to study at the University of Otago on the South Island of New Zealand. There, he became interested in the role of deep earth fluids and earthquakes, researching the Alpine fault that separates the Indo-Australian and Pacific Plates. In 1993, he completed his Diploma in Science and Geology.
He returned to the U.S. to complete his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with funding from a Shell fellowship. He studied earth science, and during his studies, he took his first dive on the Alvin submersible, a three-person vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He studied submarine geomorphology and superficial fluid venting in the Cascadia Accretionary Prism. He would return to the seafloor six more times throughout his career. After his research in graduate school, Dr. McAdoo decided that a career in the oil industry was not for him and decided to pursue academia instead. While completing his doctorate in 1998, he joined Vassar College as a Minority Scholar-in-Residence. He graduated with his Ph.D. in Earth Science in 1999.
In 1999, he became an Assistant Professor in Vassar’s Department of Geology and Geography. From 2002 to 2004, Dr. McAdoo was the Mary Clark Rockefeller Assistant Professor.
From 2004 to 2005, Dr. McAdoo spent a year as a Guest Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. In 2004, he also visited Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Following the tsunami’s immediate aftermath work, he conducted social and scientific surveys that “reminds us of why we do what we do,” Dr. McAdoo said (2016). “Being able to do research in the weeks after the tsunami there has really changed my perspective. I don’t think I’ve achieved much yet…I’m just doing my job.” The visit was one of his career highlights.
In 2006, Dr. McAdoo was promoted to Associate Professor at Vassar. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Blaustein Fellow at Stanford University at the Woods Insitute for the Environment at the School of Earth Sciences. From 2009 to 2011, Dr. McAdoo was the Associate Chair for the Department of Earth Science and Geography at Vassar. In 2011, Dr. McAdoo became the Althea Ward Clark Professor of Environmental Science at Vassar.
In 2012, he helped found Yale-NUS, a partnership between the National University of Singapore and Yale University. Dr. McAdoo was a founding faculty member and Professor of Environmental Science. He was also the Inaugural Rector of Elm College at Yale-NUS, a role he held from 2012 to 2018. In 2015, he served as Yale-NUS’s Acting Dean of Students. While at Yale-NUS, Dr. McAdoo served as the Head of Environmental Studies twice, first in 2017 and again from 2019 to 2021.
In 2021, Dr. McAdoo began his current position as an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Earth and Climate Sciences Division at Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment. He researches natural disasters, geohazards, and human-environment systems to inform community resilience. His research has taken him worldwide, from New Zealand to Jamaica, Indonesia, Antarctica, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Newfoundland, Nepal, and the United States. Dr. McAdoo is also the head of the PlanetLab at Duke, where scholars work to understand how natural disasters impact marginalized communities and what can be done to alleviate suffering. Current lab projects he is involved with include research on climate change, earthquakes, landslides, road development, and health outcomes in Nepal, deforestation, ecosystem services, disease exchange, and community health in Madagascar, and extreme climate events’ impacts on emergency services in the Southeast United States.
Dr. McAdoo has received several grants and awards to conduct his research, including from the National Science Foundation and the Widgeon Foundation, and more recently, in 2024, he was awarded a grant from the Singapore National Environment Agency to develop a risk assessment and communication platform to move predictions to policy. Throughout his career, he has been able to travel to many places to conduct his research and cites his many submarine trips to the ocean floor as a career highlight.
Dr. McAdoo found himself fortunate to have such mentors: most notably, his advisor at Duke, who helped him secure the Shell fellowship, and two black female geologists who have been both good friends and advisors, advising him to “not take it personally” when he was struggling with graduate school.
Mentoring is another aspect that Dr. McAdoo enjoys. However, he has had frustrations in encouraging minority students, stating, “In general, mentoring at the undergraduate level has a lot to do with recruiting, with encouraging minority students to go into the sciences. I did that for a while, and I got frustrated with it, as not everyone loves science” (2016). However, Dr. McAdoo says that minority students who choose the field need a strong network of encouragement. “The way academia works, mentors often choose mentees because they see something familiar in those students – i.e., something of themselves. However, because there’s a lack of minority faculty in the sciences, there are few mentors for the students that are out there. Lots of minority students struggle because an academic mentor is absolutely key to succeeding in academia” (2016).
Dr. McAdoo says if there is one thing he has learned from his career in the field, it is that its rewards are more than monetary. He notes that he understands the “money mindset” that can lead many minorities and first-generation college students to reject careers in the environmental field. “I think for a lot of minority students, the focus is making money and having a good, ‘respectable’ professional career,” he says (2016). “Sometimes scientists are not in that league… they don’t make that sort of money or have that sort of image. But in my opinion, image and money are not as important as doing something you love for a career. I would do my job for free” (2016). Dr. McAdoo’s advice to minorities considering environmental careers is to “make sure you really love it” (2016).
Brian G. McAdoo. Duke, Nicholas School of the Environment. 2021. https://nicholas.duke.edu/sites/default/files/documents/McAdoo%20CV%2020….
Curriculum Vitae. Duke University. (n.d.). Brian McAdoo. https://nicholas.duke.edu/people/faculty/Dr. McAdoo
Interview conducted by Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative staff. 2016. University of Michigan – School of Natural Resources and Environment. Ann Arbor, MI.
Interview conducted by Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative staff. 2016. University of Michigan – School of Natural Resources and Environment. Ann Arbor, MI.