Coastal Community Resilience Lab 

(CCRL)

The Coastal Community Resilience Lab investigates how hydrodynamic processes in oceans and saline lakes shape environmental conditions that affect communities. We work in partnership with communities to pursue research guided by their priorities and lived experiences. Rooted in environmental justice, our work focuses on challenges that disproportionately burden marginalized communities. Beyond identifying problems, we aim to produce knowledge that communities can use to advocate for themselves and begin building meaningful, effective solutions. Our interdisciplinary approach bridges physical science and social context, with community needs at the center of our work.

Digital illustration of Earth with stylized continents in pastel green, tan, and blue shades, surrounded by yellow berries and dark green leaves, with the text 'Eco Earth' in purple on the left side.

Land and labor acknowledgment

Los Angeles is colonized, stolen Indigenous land. The Gabrielino/Tongva peoples are the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and the Southern Channel Islands). No statement is sufficient recompense for the violence enacted against Indigenous people. 

Our lab recognizes that, to this day, colonized people around the world (including the Palestinian people, boricuas, and many others) continue to fight for their right to live on their land. We live and work in the US, an empire, which has supported, facilitated, and perpetrated violence globally under the guise of freedom and liberation since its inception and, hence, we are inevitably witnesses and supporters of an oppressive system.

We also pay our respects to all those, particularly migrant and enslaved Black people, whose forced and/or uncompensated labor have made the academic institution possible. To this day, our lab can do what it does thanks to those who came before us and those who continue to live at the margins of society due to imposed socioeconomic inequities. 

Performative land and labor acknowledgments are not enough unless we complement them with decisive actions of solidarity towards those colonized. Our lab continues to make mistakes, but we strive to keep growing and learning. 

A person windsurfing on a calm body of water with a foggy hillside and trees in the background.
A wall mural of a bird of prey, possibly a hawk or falcon, painted above a yellow sign that reads 'NOT A SACRIFICE ZONE' in bold black letters. The mural features detailed feathers and a sharp beak, set against a blue background.
A red and white sign on a wooden pole at night reads, 'PARDON OUR DUST WE ARE SHRINKING THE SEA TO PROFIT UDI'.
A person wearing a wetsuit and hood swimming in a water body with a red flotation device, surrounded by floating debris and seaweed, with hills and cloudy sky in the background.
A rocky shoreline with some large, uneven rocks and two weathered wooden sticks partly embedded in the ground, overlooking a large body of calm water under a cloudy sky.