In July 2015, Danya Rumore landed her dream job when she joined the College of Law as Associate Director of the College’s Environmental Dispute Resolution Program, or EDRP.
“I’m thrilled to bring my academic training and expertise in collaborative problem solving, conflict resolution, and stakeholder engagement to bear on environmental and natural resource issues in Utah and the greater Mountain West, a region that is dear to my heart,” said Rumore, a native of Northern Idaho who completed her Ph.D in Environmental Policy and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this summer.
As the Associate Director of the EDRP program, Rumore will advance the program’s mission to foster collaborative problem solving around natural resource and environmental issues through expanding the program’s capacity building, public education, and process design initiatives. She is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in the City and Metropolitan Planning Department at the U, and will further the EDRP’s academic instruction objectives through teaching courses in negotiation and dispute resolution to planning and real estate development graduate students. Additionally, she will expand the EDRP’s research efforts, including through her work as a research affiliate of the University’s Ecological Planning Center and Global Change and Sustainability Center.
And even as Rumore has assumed her new teaching and research roles at the U, she continues to publish her work. She co-authored an article that was recently published in the Negotiation Journal, “Using Devising Seminars to Advance Collaborative Problem Solving in Complicated Public Policy Disputes.”
In addition, her new co-authored book, Managing Climate Risks for Coastal Communities, will be released in mid-September. Drawing on research from the New England Climate Adaptation Project, this work introduces a framework for building local capacity to respond to climate change. “Our hope in publishing this book was to share the many lessons we learned through many years of working closely with coastal municipalities to help them understand the climate change-related risks they face and how they can increase their resilience to future impacts,” Rumore explained. “We also believe the kind of research on which the book is based – what we call ‘participatory action research’– is a model for other academics seeking to help communities tackle the many wicked problems they face,” she added. She is currently working with the EDRP and partners throughout the university to develop research projects that would build on the lessons learned from the New England Climate Adaptation Project to help communities in Utah and the Mountain West prepare for and respond to climate-related risks such as drought and wildfire.
In the meantime, Rumore said she is settling into her new job. “The Associate Director position is a new addition to the EDRP, and I’m very excited to see what we will be able to create through the additional capacity I bring to our program,” she said. “It is also a pleasure to join the S.J. Quinney College of Law and Department of City and Metropolitan Planning communities — I could not ask for better colleagues…Or for a better office, for that matter: the new law school is pretty nice!”