Celebrating faculty: Kristen Sanford

Kristen Sanford, professor of civil and environmental engineering

What is the focus of your research?

I am a civil engineer with expertise in transportation systems, sustainable infrastructure management, and engineering education. I study sociotechnical challenges—combining technical knowledge with multidisciplinary methods to understand and model how systems work. The overarching goal of my scholarly work is to improve the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of our built environment. 

Under this umbrella, I have investigated research questions that range from how we can better model infrastructure decision-making and policy impacts to how we can effect change in engineering education that will lead to better engineers as well as better informed citizens. For example, I have studied how different highway safety measures affect work zone safety, how making sustainable choices early in the building design process affects the total cost of ownership for a building over its lifetime, and how curricula for engineering students can promote sociotechnical thinking. My scholarship has evolved from modeling how engineers and policymakers can make better decisions in practice to investigating how we can educate students to employ a sociotechnical, equity-focused approach to problems—and ultimately make better decisions in practice. 

How do students benefit from your scholarship and research? 

Students benefit from my scholarship by working as student-researchers, learning about the research topic as well generalizable skills—for example, how to investigate the literature on a topic and how to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses of data. More broadly, though, students benefit as my scholarship engages faculty across the country in changing course content and teaching methods, helping students learn to solve infrastructure challenges from a sociotechnical perspective. At Lafayette, I incorporate what I have learned through my scholarship in my courses, challenging students to understand that infrastructure issues are equity issues and inspiring them to make our built environment more just. 

What will you be teaching in the fall? 

This fall I will be teaching two sections of my First-Year Seminar, “Sustainable Cities: Urban Infrastructure and Equity.” I really enjoy the opportunity to engage students who plan to pursue a wide variety of majors in thinking critically about the world around us—what we refer to as “infrastructure” or “the built environment.” Students reflect on their personal experiences with the built environment and how it has impacted their lives in positive and negative ways, and they learn about the experiences of others. I aim to inspire them to make their communities better, as engineers and engaged citizens.

Read more about faculty members newly named full professors.