Santina Contreras is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on interrogating community engagement practices surrounding hazards and disasters. Specifically, this involves examining the implementation, equitability, and underlying power dynamics associated with community engagement activities in hazard, disaster, and environmental planning spaces. In her work, she takes an interdisciplinary approach toward understanding relationships between local communities and external stakeholders (organizations, planners, engineers, etc.) to highlight the ways in which inequitable engagement approaches undertaken by these entities can lead to the overburdening and extraction of local communities.