About

Adjo A. Amekudzi-Kennedy is the Associate Chair for Academic Innovation and holds the title of Frederick Law Olmsted Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her role involves advancing academic initiatives within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Environmental planning
• Geography
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Engineering ethics
• Engineering
• Management science
• Environmental resource management
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Creating Sustainable and Resilient Transportation Systems: Effective Practices and Complexities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Case study of flood risk and vulnerability in the city of Atlanta – A social, economic, technical, and institutional perspective

  Resilient Cities and Structures · 2025-04-12 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  The negative impacts of natural hazards on communities at all scales have been increasing. Floods comprise one such natural hazard that has emerged as one of the most destructive in the US and worldwide. While a lot of damage is estimated in terms of the cost of rebuilding infrastructure and direct loss of economy, the negative impacts of such disruptions go beyond the physical infrastructure. The impact on (and of) the social and institutional framework is rarely examined in conjunction with the physical and technical aspects. This paper examines flood vulnerability and risk of a community at an intersection of social, ecological, technical, and intuitional perspectives, and presents a framework for a holistic flood vulnerability and risk assessment that has a strong foundation in all four aspects of a resilient community. The study builds on the existing risk, vulnerability, and hazard assessment approaches, and refines them with a holistic perspective. The study uses a mixed method approach with qualitative and quantitative methodologies to assess flood occurrence probabilities, vulnerability, and risk from the social, ecological, technical, and institutional perspectives. A case study of the City of Atlanta is conducted using the framework to assess the overall vulnerability and risk of the city. The results of this analysis show that the regions that have the highest probability of flood hazard occurrence also appear to have the highest social, ecological, and technical vulnerabilities in the Atlanta area. While the results are intuitive, the applications support a focus on holistic resilience building across these four criteria. This study is potentially useful to practitioners, researchers, government agencies, and community organizations working to mitigate flood risk particularly as this risk continues to evolve with the changing climate.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring Civil and Environmental Engineering for First-Year Students

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• BOARD # 264: IUSE: Using Strategic Planning to Drive Curriculum and Cultural Change

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Zhanmin Zhang

  Journal of Infrastructure Systems · 2025-04-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fixing the Potholes on the Road to Academic Success: A Curriculum for Engineering Educators to Create and Sustain Meaningful Change

  Education Sciences · 2025-11-09

  articleOpen access

  Engineering education has faced significant and deep-rooted challenges, including outdated curricula and pedagogical practices, limited access for underrepresented groups, and persistent diversity gaps, that collectively undermine its ability to equip future generations of engineers for a rapidly evolving world. The changes that are needed to reform engineering education are monumental and highlight not only the need for systemic transformation of educational structures but also a fundamental shift in the mindsets of those leading the change. Faculty, professional staff, and administrators must develop knowledge and skills that go beyond their disciplinary training to drive sustainable reform. This article presents a professional development curriculum that has, for over a decade, equipped academic change agents with the tools to implement lasting change. Drawing on experiences from teams supported by the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (NSF RED) program, the article highlights proven strategies that academic change agents can master and situates them within the broader literature on change in higher education. Specifically, we focus on how academic change agents can develop capacity for systems thinking, build their ability to communicate effectively with various community members, leverage strategic partnerships to increase impact, and cultivate a supportive community of practice with other change agents.

  PublisherDOI

• Effective Practices and Lessons Learned in Managing and Sustaining Curriculum and Cultural Change at CEEatGT

  2025-08-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Enhancing Disaster Resilience and Authentic Public Partnership in Transportation Practice: Negotiated Resilience Capability Maturity Model

  Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · 2025-10-06

  article

  The status quo for infrastructure and community preparedness for climate disasters is not adequate for the intensifying climate-hazard landscape in many contexts, and this deficiency can be exacerbated by ineffective public involvement practices. Negotiated resilience is an emerging concept that acknowledges the evolving nature of resilience goals and the relationship between community engagement and climate-resilience outcomes. This study aims to enhance negotiated resilience outcomes for transportation agencies in the U.S. by codeveloping, with transportation practitioners, practical tools integrating disaster management capabilities (i.e., preparedness, rapidity, flexibility) with authentic public involvement practices. To achieve this objective, the study develops a capability maturity model (CMM) with indicators that transportation agencies may use to benchmark the effectiveness of negotiated resilience practices in achieving disaster preparedness in transportation systems. Additionally, this study develops a self-assessment tool that maps to the various capabilities in the CMM. Based on four rounds of targeted transportation expert interviews, the Negotiated Resilience Capability Maturity Model (NR-CMM) and tool are refined to reflect stakeholder feedback across multiple types of transportation agencies. The NR-CMM and self-assessment tool offer a practical method for state and local departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organizations, and other transportation agencies to assess their effectiveness across multiple areas affecting disruption absorption and community preparedness, including stakeholder involvement, internal and external education efforts, and disaster management.

  PublisherDOI

• Review on approaches to assess rail system resilience: a multi-capability perspective

  Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems · 2025-05-20 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effective Practices in Flood Adaptation by Recognizing System, Organization, and Project Interdependencies

  Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · 2024-02-23

  article

  Flooding is a historical and intensifying challenge to transportation infrastructure and system performance and the interconnected systems it supports. Resilience programs attempt to meet the challenges flooding poses by adapting the infrastructure to withstand environmental pressures and preserve function during and after disasters. Current adaptation practices, however, often take the form of hard protective measures, implemented exclusively on transportation assets with little coordination between organizations. As a result, projects can be overly expensive, offer incomplete protection, and result in catastrophic failures across multiple infrastructure systems, such as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. To build adaptive capabilities effectively, this study recognized the interdependencies among multiple infrastructure systems at the system-, organizational-, and project levels of planning. At the system level, adaptations addressing hazard-based threats to infrastructure systems—such as stormwater and transportation—strengthened infrastructure against cascading failures and improve efficiency in adapting interdependent infrastructure networks. At an organization level, teams that self-reorganized to fit project needs were found to respond more effectively to change and overcame difficulties in implementing adaptations. At a project level, anticipating and addressing causal relationships between the environment and infrastructure were found to improve the reliability of adaptations against catastrophic failure. The effective practices presented came from Malaysia, Sweden, Poland, and other countries around the world. Implementation of these complementary practices, together with asset-based adaptations as needed, can build adaptive capabilities by addressing the interdependencies between infrastructure planning at multiple levels.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ellen Zerbe

  Pennsylvania State University

  18 shared

• Kevin Haas

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  18 shared

• D. R. Webster

  University of California, Davis

  17 shared

• Stefanie Brodie

  15 shared

• Janille Smith‐Colin

  15 shared

• Stephanie Amoaning‐Yankson

  13 shared

• Jamie Montague Fischer

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  11 shared

• Prerna Singh

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Civil & Environmental Engineering

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1999

• M.S., Infrastructure Systems, Civil & Environmental Engineering

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1997

• M.S., Civil Engineering (Transportation), Civil & Environmental Engineering

  Florida International University

  1996

• B.S., Civil & Environmental Engineering

  Stanford University

  1994

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers
• Member of the National Academy of Construction