Kelley Christensen

Contact

kelleyc@mtu.edu
906-487-3510
Wadsworth Hall G42W

Science and Technology Publications Writer, University Marketing and Communications

Biography

Kelley writes university research stories and articles for university publications. She studied news-editorial journalism and American literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and holds a master's in technical communication from Montana Tech. She is pursuing her doctorate in environmental policy at Michigan Tech.

About Kelley

Her career includes writing for small-town newspapers in Montana and working as a public information officer, an events coordinator, and science editor for an IEEE publication, Earthzine.
She enjoys hiking and cross-country skiing with her family, reading voraciously, crocheting, and exploring the Keweenaw.

Recent Stories

Clouds and Soot: Understanding Air Pollution and Atmosphere Interactions

Researchers burn kerosene in an oil lamp under a ventilation hood. They pressurize the air with a pump to suck the smoke into the cloud chamber. The experiments in the cloud chamber have allowed the researchers to understand that the longer soot particles are in the atmosphere, the more opportunities they have to become cloud-processed, and the greater the chance the particles become compacted.

When carbon burns — whether it’s the charcoal on your barbeque or from a forest fire — soot is released into the atmosphere. But what goes up must come down, so what happens to soot? When soot particles are "cloud processed" they become more compact. The particles are incorporated into cloud droplets, which leads to the . . . Read More

C’est La Vie: Historians Map French-speaking Migrations with Geospatial Tech

Michigan Tech researchers will use the Keweenaw Time Traveler and a combination of spatial and archival datasets to focus specifically on whether French-Canadians were socially mobile as they migrated from Canada to Michiganâ€™s Upper Peninsula during the period of 1860 to 1940.

Over the course of 400 years, thousands of French-speaking people moved to North America to work as fur trappers, voyageurs, farmers and priests, and later primarily as lumbermen. Hypothesis Research has to start somewhere. And it's usually a well-informed prediction. . . . Read More

Hazards Mapping, History and the Future of Rust Belt Cities

Modeling the estimated accumulation of industrial hazards on a postindustrial landscape to highlight higher-risk hotspots requires a spatial and temporal approach. Image Credit: Dan Trepal

More people live in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history. But cities aren’t unchanging edifices; they expand and contract, their demographics shift and their leaders write policies with positive and negative effects on different people. Grants and Funding Social . . . Read More

Mechanism Modeling for Better Forecasts, Climate Predictions

Better modeling gives weather forecasters and climate scientists a more accurate picture of what happens where atmosphere and ocean meet.

As hurricanes grow in power as the climate changes, accurately modeling the interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean grows increasingly important to prepare people to batten down or to evacuate. The many mechanisms of the atmosphere-ocean system — known as air-sea flux — make modeling extremely complicated, however. . . . Read More