Dr. Debra Laefer is a Full Professor at the Center for Urban Science and Progress and Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University. She received her degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, Ph.D.), NYU (MEng), and Columbia University (BS, BA). She has a wide-ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation. Her research interests include urban Informatics, remote sensing, geospatial data managment, geotechnical engineering, disaster mitigation and response, and sustainability. In her decade and a half as a faculty member in both the US and Europe, she has served as the principal investigator for grants from a wide range of sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, the US Federal Highway Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Science Foundation Ireland, and the European Research Council (including a EUR 1.5 million single investigator award from the flagship ERC program; she is the only civil engineer to have been funded in Ireland in the program’s 11-year history). She has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications and been awarded four patents. She helped to form national research programs and policies in her governmental appointment to the Irish Research Council (2016–2020).