Professor Colten is the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. After earning his PhD at Syracuse University, he worked for the State of Illinois and in the private sector for more than a decade. He returned to the academy in 1996 and returned to LSU in 2000. Among his publications are the award-winning An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (2005), Perilous Place, Powerful Storms: Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana (2009), and Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance (2014) He has dedicated most of the past 15 years to research on community resilience and adaptation in Louisiana’s coastal region. In 2018 he was inducted into the inaugural class of Fellows by the American Association of Geographers.