Benjamin Curran

Benjamin Curran has over 10 years of experience as an educator in the historic preservation field. Currently Curran works with The Campaign and Preservation Maryland as the Historic Trades Curriculum Developer. As a co-investigator for a research project funded by a National Geographic Society/Waitt Foundation grant, he worked as a senior member of the group investigating impacts of climate change and sea level rise and effects of salt water intrusion for coastal heritage sites for the University of New Hampshire Earth System Research Center in Durham, N.H. Curran and his colleagues published an article in the APTI’s 2016 special issue of the Journal of Preservation Technology on Climate Change.

While inundation, erosion, and storm surge will pose the most notable and visible dangers to our coastal cultural heritage, a more insidious and subversive threat, the progressive lifting of the coastal fresh water meniscus, i.e. the water table, by elevated sea levels will start effecting historical and cultural site long before inundation occurs. This project intends to explore the viability of constructing low-cost open-source sensors for the purpose of increasing the breadth of communities engaged in self-monitoring their susceptibility to sea level rise.