Speakers

Esesua Ikpefan is the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Montgomery, Alabama, where she designs and implements the city’s inaugural resilience strategy through the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. In this role, she builds institutional capacity to anticipate, withstand, and recover from shocks—establishing data-driven decision-making frameworks, embedding community engagement in planning processes, and championing policies that prioritize Montgomery’s most vulnerable residents.

An urban resilience scholar-practitioner, Esesua completed a doctorate in Urbanism and Landscape at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research explores how colonial legacies, land claims, and informal networks influence risk, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity in Nigerian cities, translating these insights into actionable guidance for cities facing similar pressures.

Previously, Esesua served as an Africa Fellow with the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, co-authoring a white paper on Early Warning Systems in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence settings and providing analytical support for disaster-risk initiatives in Nigeria and Mozambique.

She has taught and conducted research at Harvard College and Graduate School of Design and was a Dean’s Equity & Inclusion Initiative Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. Esesua also holds a Master of Design in Critical Conservation from the Graduate School of Design and a B.S. in Environmental Design from Syracuse University.

Across scholarship and practice, she centers equity, data, and community collaboration to build more resilient and just urban futures.