Kelsey Johnson

Assistant Director and Planner

kjohnson@gccds.msstate.edu

Kelsey Johnson is the Assistant Director and Senior Planner at GCCDS and has been with the Design Studio since 2011. She received a Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, focusing on environmental and land use policy and planning. The majority of her studies concentrated on planning issues and policy in coastal towns. Kelsey was fortunate to gain experience studying at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in North Carolina where she studied coastal and ocean policy and planning in an area that was at the forefront of these issues. She also spent a semester at the School for Field Studies in the small fishing village of Puerto San Carlos, Baja California Sur, Mexico and was able to learn more about the unique dynamic between the marine environment and the communities that depend directly and indirectly on them.

Kelsey has previously worked in the Water Resources Department of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in Washington, D.C., and as an AmeriCorps member in the Community and Economic Development Department at Focus: HOPE in Detroit, Michigan.