Dr. Ariane Elizabeth Jong-Levinger is now an established Doctor of Philosophy in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UCI, having just completed her dissertation titled “Estimating Post-Fire Hazards: Model Formulation Parameterization and Applications” in July 2023. In 2016, she earned her B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from Chapman University in Orange, CA. Before jumping into a specialized field of research, she worked with the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Council for Watershed Health as a Staff Scientist for two years.
At the Council for Watershed Health, she discovered her passion for working on solutions to urban flooding. To continue her pursuit of this passion, she joined UCI, where she first earned her M.S. and then her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering. At UCI, she was under the advising of Professor Brett Sanders, who studies urban flooding using flood risk simulations at street-level resolution to produce actionable information for flood management policies.
After five years at UCI, Dr. Jong-Levinger is now going full circle and returning to her undergraduate university as a postdoctoral scholar to study the influence of interactions between wildfire, storms, and flood management infrastructure on the development of post-fire floods and debris flows.
The Civil and Environmental Engineering community at UCI is grateful for her contributions and is sad, yet so proud, to see her take this next step in her journey. As we said our farewells, we sought her valuable advice with one question:
As you move onto a new chapter in your career, is there anything you wish you had said to yourself at the beginning?
“It is important to recognize when to ask for help,” she started. “Don’t underestimate self-care.”
Dr. Jong-Levinger described how being a PhD student at a rigorous university is both physically and mentally taxing. She described how, for a whole day, she might find herself in back-to-back labs, working on several papers to grade, and then her own research to conduct on the side.
“Being an undergraduate is like climbing a ladder; you have to put in work to make your way up one rung at a time. But that ladder is built for you by the school, by the professors, by the teaching assistants. When you’re a graduate student researcher, you have to build that ladder yourself while simultaneously climbing it, sometimes while helping your students build and climb their own.”
An Integral Part of the CEE Community
Dr. Jong-Levinger was a huge part of the CEE community at UCI, having been a member of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Association at UCI (CEEGA) and the former president of Reframing Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCI (CEER). She will remain a member of the UCI California Wildfire and Flood Survey as the only female researcher working alongside her former dissertation panel advisors, UCI Professors Brett Sanders and Doug Houston.
Even on a personal level, Dr. Jong-Levinger is an extroverted and extremely kind person. She spent hours helping students sort out their fluid-mechanics code during Teaching Assistant hours, talking to students during her much–needed lunch break, or addressing student concerns after hours.
Both faculty and students alike will miss her greatly but wish her the best in her next great academic endeavors.
