Autumn Bland attends the Global Young Scientists Summit in Singapore.
Autumn Bland is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology. With a master’s degree in sustainability management (water), she joined the WaterCube NRT in 2025, viewing the program as a natural fit for continuing her academic and professional growth.
“When you think of collective research and pushing boundaries, which is what you have to do in water studies, it’s really important to work with people from different disciplines and backgrounds to get a more holistic idea,” she said.
Autumn has worked with her advisor, Associate Professor Stephen Gasteyer, on a project about water access in the U.S. Together, they’ve built a national dashboard that examines household and individual water access, including access to plumbing and basic water infrastructure. The project is in collaboration with Assistant Professor Tom Mueller (University of Kansas Medical Center), the human rights nonprofit organization DigDeep, and the Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at MSU. Their goal was to create a tool that combines data, real-time information, and narratives to support research, advocacy, and public understanding of water insecurity.
Autumn (right) at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
As part of this work, Autumn spent the summer of 2025 data scraping for every county in the U.S. to identify news coverage related to water access, contamination, and water insecurity. These stories have been integrated into the dashboard to add greater context alongside quantitative data.
In August of 2025, Autumn and Professor Gasteyer presented their work on the water access dashboard at the Rural Sociological Society Annual Meeting. Their presentation, “Rural Household Water and Sanitation Security – Digital Tools and Community Engagement,” highlighted how digital platforms can support knowledge and engagement around water insecurity. Autumn also co-authored, “Fluid Data: The Problem of Accurately Estimating Household Access to Water and Sanitation in the United States” with Gasteyer and Kimberly Slinde Lemme (DigDeep) in February 2026.
Autumn is currently working with Assistant Professor Saleh Ahmed on research examining water access disproportionality and water security in coastal communities in Bangladesh, building on prior fieldwork experience in coastal India conducted through a field school. But as she advances in her PhD, Autumn plans to focus her research on water access in the U.S. “There are millions of people that don’t have access to water, don’t have infrastructure, [in the U.S.],” she said. “We’re based in the U.S., so it makes sense to start here.”