Amy E. Lesen is is Research Associate Professor at the Tulane ByWater Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Lesen works on the coast and in urban estuaries. The overarching theme of her work is the interrelatedness between environmental and human social dynamics in coastal cities and coastal communities, and how those systems are influenced by climate and environmental change. Most of her current work focuses on New Orleans and the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Lesen also researches and writes about the intersection between science and the arts, disaster resilience, informal science learning, scientific public engagement, science communication, participatory research, and interdisciplinarity. She was Associate Professor of Biology at Dillard University, a small, historically black college in New Orleans (2007–14), where she was also Chair of the Biology Department (2009–12). She has a BSc from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Marine Fisheries Biology and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in Integrative Biology with a concentration in biological oceanography and paleoceanography. Before joining Tulane University in September 2014, Lesen was an assistant professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (2003–07).