Kelsey Reese (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 2021) is a computational social scientist with extensive experience utilizing large-scale geospatial analyses with archaeological datasets. Her research explores the complexities of community development, occupation, and resiliency of subsistence-farmers during periods of sustained climate change in ecologically marginal spaces. Kelsey’s experience includes almost 15 years of fieldwork in the northern U.S. Southwest, with several years directing pedestrian survey on the Mesa Verde North Escarpment in Southwestern Colorado and, more recently, on the Pajarito Plateau in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico.
While shooting lasers through the trees to see the ground was just a pipe dream during her first season in Mesa Verde many years ago, the recent proliferation of publicly available LiDAR data has been a dream come true. Kelsey has worked in her free time to implement machine learning and artificial intelligence across the U.S. Southwest region to identify the true scale of Ancestral Pueblo landscape engineering that until recently has been invisible to archaeologists.
She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in Anthropology from Washington State University, and a B.A. in Political Science and Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Kelsey currently works as a Cultural Resources Specialist for Los Alamos National Laboratory and is a strong advocate for the production and dissemination of free and open source research.
Kelsey is a former Crow Canyon intern and a contributor to the Center’s Village Ecodynamics Project.