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I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto working with the Toronto Climate Observatory and I completed my Ph.D. in Information Science at Cornell University.
I am a researcher, designer, and artist investigating the ecological, social, and political implications of computing technologies and infrastructures. My current work examines the changing role of digital infrastructures and technologies in climate adaptation and mitigation projects. My recent research has addressed topics like how communities live with networked infrastructures amid planetary change, how infrastructures are planned to withstand future disasters, how utility and telecoms workers restore networked services, and how communities envision infrastructures that support longer-term visions for climate justice.
I co-steward SwampNet, a project I co-founded in 2023 to build community-based and place-based technologies in Bvlbancha|New Orleans and across the American Gulf South. I also work on projects that study and design tools that are used for understanding and exploring relations with the environment. This research includes studying the development of digital agriculture networking infrastructure and designing environmental sensing tools.
CV is available here (last updated September 2025)
My email is jenliu @ cs.toronto.edu
~* Some recent news:*~
October 2026: Monique Verdin and I have a new essay, "A Tale of Three Storms" out in the Association of Progressive Communications on a history of community-based wireless networking through the lens of three hurricanes.
October 2026: Presented at the De Balie in Amsterdam as part of "The Politics of Internet" event with Britt Paris! Also got to spend a few days with the very inspiring people at the critical infrastructure lab as part of their Radical Infrastructure workshop!
October 2026: Finally attended my first in-person 4S :) ! I presented some ongoing collaborative work on the history of the networking stack, was part of a roundtable on building a people's internet, and had a making and doing table with some SwampNet stuff and an NFC keychain craft
September 2026: SwampNet and Bvlbancha Liberation Radio presented at the Grassroots Radio Conference in Pensacola, FL on community-based ad hoc networks!
July 2026: This summer I have a pictorial published in DIS on "Noticing Utility Poles" and another in COMPASS co-authored with my SwampNet team (Monique Verdin, Jenna Mae, and Ozone 504) on Staying with Friction: Designing Community-Based Communication Infrastructure During Climate Disruption"April 2026: April 2026: Will be giving a Flashlab seminar talk on "Ghosting the Coast: Infrastructural Retreat in Southeast Louisiana"
January 2026: January 2026: SwampNet received a Rhizome microgrant!
October 2025: I started as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto!
September 2025: Successfully defended my dissertation, "Beyond the Storm: Climate Change, Repair, and Networked Infrastructures in Southeast Louisiana" :) :)
August 2025: My co-authored piece with Monique Verdin and Ozone 504, Signals Through the Storm: Designing Networks for Mutual Aid Communities in Southeast Louisiana" is out in interactions magazine! The piece shares several considerations we made in designing a system that works not only to support emergency communications, but longer-term visions of climate justice.
August 2025: My co-authored piece Hannah Friedrich, Melissa Villarreal, and Yajaira Ayala, "Positionalities in disaster recovery research: reflections from fieldwork across the Gulf South" was published in the Disaster Prevention and Management Journal. We suggest using vignettes as a way to examine ethics and power differentials while navigating research.
April 2025: Some environmental sensors I designed are part of the Interspecies" exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, Portugal! The exhibit opened on April 3 and will be up until August 31 2025.
April 2025: My piece "From Sugarcane to Data Centers" is out with Data & Society's "The Cloud is Dead" series on climate and technology. I examine previous economic booms in Louisiana to understand what new efforts in building data centers for AI across the state might entail.
April 2025: My collaborator Monique Verdin and I just published "Networking a Network", a short piece about SwampNet project in the most recent issue of Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place, & Community.
April 2025: Our workshop "Datafication of Climate Change: From Prediction to Participation" was accepted to the Aarhus 2025 conference on critical computing, with co-authors from U of Toronto, Georgia Tech, and Aarhus University. Hope to share more soon :)
March 2025: "Data Beyond Disaster," co-authored with Hannah Friedrich, Geography PhD student at Arizona State University was accepted to a panel on "Building and Infrastructuring Disaster-STS" for the 4S conference in Seattle this fall. Looking forward to attending my first in-person 4S conference!
February 2025: I joined the research advisory board for a Aotearoa (New Zealand) based project studying Internet infrastructures and climate resilience. The project is led by researchers at Brainbox Institute and is supported by the Internet Society.
December 2024: I presented parts of my dissertation research as an invited virtual panelist for a Digital Infrastructure and Society Consultants (DISC) Meeting.
November 2024: I am an invited panelist a session on Regenerative Infrastructures as part of the Sustainable and Equitable Internet Infrastructure Dialogs and Debates , hosted by Critical Infrastructure Lab, the Green Web Foundation, and Mozilla Foundation.
November 2024: SwampNet received a Feminist Tech Infrastructure Grant from the Numun Fund!