In the midst of his doctoral work, Michael Charles ’16 thought he would leave academia – he couldn’t see a future in it that centered his advocacy for Indigenous communities like his own.
“At that point, I didn’t see where my goals fit,” said Charles, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and now assistant professor in biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). “All through my Ph.D., I could feel the work I really wanted to do was going to be seen as not-engineering.”
Since then, Charles has forged a new path that combines his advocacy and his research. He uses computational modeling to provide Indigenous communities with data they can use to advocate for themselves – and he’s pushing the science of ecological modeling and sustainable engineering forward to better represent complex, dynamic situations and challenges.
Charles is a 2024-25 Faculty Fellow in Engaged Scholarship.