Rate My Professor Dean Kyne

Dean Kyne is a Professor and Disaster Studies Program Coordinator at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), contributing to Social Science through his role in the Department of Sociology. He earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Social Science from Arizona State University, a Master of Professional Studies in Environmental Resources Management and Policy from Cornell University, a Master of Public Administration in Public Policy from Pennsylvania State University, and a Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems from Arizona State University. Additionally, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in International Disaster Management at Karlsruhe University. Kyne joined UTRGV in August 2015 as Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology. Prior to that, he served as Research Director for the Maricopa County Government in Phoenix, Arizona, and held researcher positions at Arizona State University.

Kyne's research interests include disasters, resiliency, social capital, environmental justice, nuclear power disasters, sustainability, GIS, emergency management, and environmental sociology. Key publications feature "Capturing Bonding, Bridging, and Linking Social Capital through Publicly Available Data" (Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 2020, with Daniel P. Aldrich), "Emerging Environmental Justice Issues in Nuclear Power and Radioactive Contamination" (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2016, with Bob Bolin), chapters in Nuclear Power Plant Emergencies in the USA (2017), "A Bird’s-Eye View of Colonias Hosting Forgotten Americans and Their Community Resilience in the Rio Grande Valley" (2023), and "Social Connectedness, Physical Distancing, and Anxiety in Complying with Shelter-In-Place Orders and Advisories during the Once-In-A-Century COVID-19 Pandemic in the US" (2022). Since 2017, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Disaster Response and Emergency Management and has guest-edited special issues. A recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in 2020, Kyne teaches courses such as Disaster and Society, Disaster Resiliency and Sustainability, Environmental Sociology, and GIS for Disaster Management, advancing interdisciplinary disaster studies via scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.