About

Julia Cardwell is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Spatial Data Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position she has held since January 2025. She also serves as the Lead Instructor for the Masters of Applied Data Science program within the School of Data & Information Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill starting January 2026. Julia completed her Ph.D. in Geography & Environment at UNC Chapel Hill in 2024, following a Master of Arts in Geography from the same institution in 2021. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies with a minor in Data Science from Davidson College in 2019, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Her research focuses on the impacts of weather, graph theory, rural road networks, pedestrian networks, and network redundancy. Julia's teaching portfolio includes courses on Geospatial Technology, Maps and Society, Introduction to Spatial Data Science, Geographic Information, Quantitative Methods in Geography, Geographic Information Systems, and Geospatial Data Analysis with Google Earth Engine. She is proficient in technical skills including R, Python, Stata, JavaScript, ArcGIS, QGIS, Google Earth Engine, SPSS, and cluster computing.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Geography
• Social Science
• Computer Security
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Law
• Meteorology
• Environmental planning
• Archaeology
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Public administration
• Environmental health
• Medicine
• Business
• Demography

Selected publications

• Local news sentiment towards FEMA recovery efforts after Hurricane Florence in North Carolina

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2025-02-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Newspaper sentiment and framing have the power to represent and inform public opinion on a variety of important issues. This study examines local news articles after Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina in the United States in September 2018 to understand the framing efforts undertaken by the outlets that produced these reports, as well as their impact on news sentiment towards the flood recovery efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The results indicate that while most articles published in the wake of Florence have a neutral sentiment, there are a significant number of both positively and negatively coded articles that illuminate important information about how the public engaged with and comprehended the role of FEMA during recovery from the disaster, and how the media chose to cover its involvement. Such scrutiny will continue to inform how public, private, and government actors understand FEMA's role and whether it achieves its goals in the future.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Impacts of weather-related road closures on daily habitual travel in North Carolina

  Journal of Transport Geography · 2024-11-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Community perceptions of a floodplain buyout program in Charlotte, North Carolina

  Natural Hazards · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Environmental resource management
  PublisherDOI

• Examining the shifting role of the human in disaster studies

  Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society · 2022-07-28 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This review essay considers the development of the field of disaster studies and specifically, examines the myriad ways in which the role of the human has shifted during this development. The essay focuses on four major periods of development within disaster studies, including: the hazard-risk paradigm, the bounded rationality paradigm, the concept of social vulnerability and critiques of social vulnerability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Local news sentiment towards FEMA recovery efforts after Hurricane Florence in North Carolina

  Disasters · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Newspaper sentiment and framing have the power to represent and inform public opinion on a variety of important issues. This study examines local news articles after Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina in the United States in September 2018 to understand the framing efforts undertaken by the outlets that produced these reports, as well as their impact on news sentiment towards the flood recovery efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The results indicate that while most articles published in the wake of Florence have a neutral sentiment, there are a significant number of both positively and negatively coded articles that illuminate important information about how the public engaged with and comprehended the role of FEMA during recovery from the disaster, and how the media chose to cover its involvement. Such scrutiny will continue to inform how public, private, and government actors understand FEMA's role and whether it achieves its goals in the future.

  PublisherDOI

• Trends in recovery aid concentration following Hurricane Florence in North Carolina: exploring the role of physical damage, community vulnerability, and Hurricane Matthew

  Environmental Hazards · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Security

  The intensity of extreme events like hurricanes is predicted to increase. As such, the role of federal disaster aid programmes in assisting community recovery will also grow, and potential inequities in these programmes could compound in an increasing disaster landscape. This study analyzes recovery efforts after Hurricane Florence (2018) to identify trends in areas that were targeted for recovery aid. Using a series of Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and spatial lag models, divergences in aid are investigated after controlling for physical damage and the study suggests that these divergences can be partially predicted by social and community factors, including characteristics that are typically associated with increased social vulnerability (such as high renter population, older housing stock, and high population of non-white residents). In addition, because North Carolina experienced two major hurricanes in the period of just two years (Hurricane Matthew in 2016), this study also analyzes the role of successive extremes in the outcomes of aid concentration and finds that communities successful in achieving aid after Hurricane Matthew were similarly successful after Hurricane Florence. Finally, the paper emphasises the importance of monitoring potential inequities in federal recovery aid payout, which can provide actionable opportunities for potential improvements to these programmes.

  PublisherDOI

• Community Perceptions of a Floodplain Buyout Program in Charlotte, North Carolina

  Research Square · 2021-10-08 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Charles E. Konrad

  2 shared

• Kristen N. Cowan

  Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education

  1 shared

• Paul L. Delamater

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared