Kelly Leilani Main, Executive Director (email)

Kelly is an urban planner and designer working at the intersection of community-led climate adaptation planning and rights-driven relocation policy. As a Research Associate at MIT, Kelly has worked on a variety of interdisciplinary and international teams in the US and abroad including the Philippines, Turkey, Ghana, Uganda, Peru, Nepal, Lebanon, and Palestine. Her work spans both high-tech smart city strategies and ‘soft’ community engagement: from machine learning to community-driven adaptation initiatives.

Kelly currently serves as the chair of the Climigration Network Learning Committee and held a previous role on the American Society of Adaptation Professionals Climate Migration and Managed Retreat Member Group. Her work and research on climate-adaptive urban planning has been presented at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Conference on Cities (2018), International Conference on Building Resilience (2018), and At What Point Managed Retreat? Conference at Columbia University (2019), and published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Landscape Architecture Frontiers, and Planning Theory and Practice. 

Kelly has a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Field Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.