Meghan T Holtan, Ph.D.

Dr. Meghan Holtan researches housing, energy, and climate adaptation in Alaska
and the circumpolar North. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning
from the University at Buffalo, and grew up in Anchorage, where she spent
twelve years as a planning analyst before returning to graduate school.

For her dissertation, she worked with Alaska Tribal and public housing providers
to understand how they are already adapting to rapid environmental change, and
to co-design evaluation tools that fit the way they actually work, supported by a
NOAA Climate Program Office grant on which she served as co-investigator. Her
work appears in Health & Place, the Journal of Environmental Planning and
Management, and Environment and Behavior. She is also the residential energy
analyst for the forthcoming Alaska Housing Assessment.

Her methods include interviews, survey and secondary data analysis, geospatial
analysis, and arts-based approaches. She trained and performed as a circus
artist before she was a planner, and has kept using performance and installation as research: most recently, projecting thermal imagery and circus acts across five building facades in downtown Anchorage in the middle of winter, to ask what energy efficiency is actually for.

If you work in housing, energy, or the relationship between the built environment
and health in the North and want to collaborate, please reach out.