Dr. Ann-Perry Witmer is a teaching associate professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and several College of Engineering and College of ACES departments at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. She is the originator of the emerging discipline of Contextual Engineering, which applies the societal conditions to technical design processes, and she leads a sizeable Contextual Engineering Research Group that explores the context of engineering for power system design, environmental infrastructure, and ecosystems affected by climate change. Dr. Witmer’s work has brought her into close association with communities on five continents, exploring place-based knowledge and applying it to engineering solutions that best address user needs, and she recently was elected president of the Global FEW Hub Alliance, a worldwide network of organizations dedicated to curating place-based knowledge for climate adaptation. In addition to her engineering degrees from the University of Illinois, Dr. Witmer holds degrees in journalism and art history from Boston University and had been a working journalist for daily newspapers in Illinois and Pennsylvania before becoming an engineer.