Adam Wiechman will be joining the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Levin Lab in August 2025. He earned his Ph.D. in Sustainability with a concentration in Complex Adaptive Systems Science at Arizona State University where he was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His work focuses on the politics of infrastructure investment and its relationship to sustainability goals, including resilience and equity. He maintains an interdisciplinary approach that draws on perspectives from public policy and administration, political economy, social-ecological systems, and complexity science to advance scholarly and practical understanding. His doctoral work examined how the design of institutions responsible for infrastructure affects the robustness of infrastructure systems to social and environmental variation, using the example of urban water systems in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.  

While at Princeton, Adam will work with Simon Levin and Elke Weber to understand the interaction between multiple forms of uncertainty (environmental, social, and funding), institutional design, regional collaboration, and local decision making in the implementation of sustainable infrastructure transitions. He intends to empirically ground the work in the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law through a survey conducted with colleagues at Indiana University Bloomington while also developing an agent-based model of institutionally constrained collective inference and infrastructure investment. In line with his commitment to translating complex insights into policy understanding, he plans to facilitate participatory workshops with public managers and officials on the relationship between uncertainty, institutions, collaboration, and infrastructure decision making.