My research, A Decade of Keep Questioning
If you had told me in 2014, when I was just starting my master's degree, that ten years later I would be sitting in Illinois, talking about grasslands while worrying about land-use exploitation in South Sumatra, I would have thought you had the wrong person. I was studying urban flooding. I had a very specific problem, a very specific place, and a bunch of possible solutions.
The first question: how did this all start?
My master's research began with a problem I saw nearby. My hometown is flooded. Streets turn into rivers. Homes get destroyed. People lose things they cannot replace. And for a long time, the dominant answer to this problem lived in the language of infrastructure: drainage systems, retention ponds, permeable pavements, green corridors. Design solutions for an engineering problem.
That framing made sense to me, and for several years I worked inside it. I mapped flood-prone areas, studied hydrological systems, and thought about how spatial design could reduce risk. My master's thesis was an attempt to answer the question seriously, to propose design interventions that could make places more resilient to flooding.
What I did not realize, until I was deep inside that work, was that I had been asking only the first half of the question. I had been asking how cities flood. I had not yet asked who deals with it when they do.
The second question: who actually lives with this?
The shift happened slowly, the way most important shifts do, as a slow accumulation of discomfort with the answers I was finding.
Infrastructure matters. Good design matters. But there are communities that have been living alongside floods for generations, without the infrastructure, without the design interventions, and without anyone particularly asking how they manage. Along the Musi River in Palembang, South Sumatra, I found exactly that. Communities that had developed their own ways of living with water, of timing their lives around the river's nature, of building and rebuilding in ways that respected and acknowledged the flood rather than fighting it.
This is what researchers call indigenous knowledge. It is, more simply, the accumulated understanding of people who have paid close attention to a place for a very long time. And what struck me, studying these communities, was not just how sophisticated that understanding was, it was how completely it depended on the ecosystem being intact.
The river had to behave in predictable enough ways. The vegetation along the banks had to hold the soil. The wetlands upstream had to absorb enough water to keep the floods within the range that local knowledge could manage. The knowledge worked because the ecosystem worked. And that is when the next question began to form.
The third question: what happens when the ecosystem itself disappears?
This is the question I carried with me when I started my PhD in 2024. It is also, I think, the question that connects everything that came before and after it.
In South Sumatra, land-use changes are visible and rapid. Forests are being converted. Wetlands are being drained. The landscapes that communities depend on (not just emotionally or culturally, but practically, for the ecosystem services that make their lives possible) are shrinking. The question is no longer just about flooding or about community coping strategies. It is about what is being lost, in concrete measurable terms, when these ecosystems disappear.
In Illinois, the story is already further along. This state has lost approximately 99% of its native prairie. What remains: the grasslands, which I now spend my research life studying. are remnants.
And what I am trying to do, using is put a number on what those remnants are still doing for us. How much carbon do they store? How much soil erosion do they prevent? What is the recreational and cultural value of being able to walk through a native prairie?
These are not romantic questions, though the subject matter is easy to romanticize. They are economic questions, asked in the language of policy and land management, because that is the language in which decisions about land actually get made.
Why is this research so dynamic?
Illinois grasslands did not disappear overnight. They disappeared gradually, conversion by conversion, because for a long time, nobody was paying attention. Native prairie was seen as empty land. Land that was not doing anything, land that was waiting to be made useful.
And so it was converted to agriculture, to development, to everything except what it already was. By the time people started asking what had been lost, 99% of it was already gone.
That is not a story about bad intentions. It is a story about what happens when the value of an ecosystem is invisible, when the carbon it stores, the soil it holds, the water it filters, the life it sustains, simply does not appear in any ledger that decision-makers look at. If something has no price, it is very easy to treat it as if it has no value.
South Sumatra has not yet reached that point. Its peatlands, wetlands, and natural forests are still there.
However, they are gradually reduced, threatened, but still there. And that is precisely why this moment matters. The same logic that erased the Illinois prairie is already at work: land that appears idle, land that appears unproductive, land that is easier to clear than to explain.
If communities and governments do not start recognizing what these landscapes are actually worth — not sentimentally, but economically, ecologically, demonstrably, then South Sumatra's natural working lands will follow the same path.
They will become remnants. And remnants, left without protection, eventually disappear.
That is what connects my research across two continents.
Illinois is not just a case study. It is a mirror, and a warning.
Why this, why now?
I am sometimes asked whether I miss the earlier work? the flooding research, the community fieldwork along the Musi River. The honest answer is that I do not experience it as a loss, because I do not experience it as separate.
The flooding research taught me to look at landscapes spatially and systematically.
The community work taught me that ecosystems and people are not separate systems, that what happens to one happens to the other.
The natural capital work is an attempt to build tools rigorous enough to make that connection legible to the people who write the policies and sign the land-use permits.
A decade in, the question has not really changed. It has just gotten more specific, and hopefully, more useful.
Why do I keep going?
Shifting focus in research is not a failure of commitment.
It is, I think, what intellectual honesty looks like in practice. You follow the question that opens up. You go where the problem takes you. And if you are lucky, you eventually look back and realize that every detour was actually part of the same road.
My research has shifted more than once, and it will probably shift again.
New data becomes available, new frameworks emerge, new field sites open up.
The specific questions will keep evolving because that is the nature of honest inquiry. You follow the evidence, you follow the gaps, you follow whatever gets you closest to being actually useful.
But the reason I am doing any of this has not changed since a decade ago.
We have always taken nature for granted. The climate is changing! it always has, and it always will. What is not inevitable is how we respond to it. We are, after all, the only species that can look at a problem this large and ask: what can we do?
Every version of my research has been an attempt to make that invisible value a little more visible, whether in the flood-prone neighborhoods of an Indonesian city, along the banks of the Musi River, in the remnant prairies of the American Midwest, or in the forests and peatlands of South Sumatra that still have a chance.
The topics change. The conviction does not.
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