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ALRS Alum Highlight: Ladd Keith '19

Today
Research by heat expert and College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture Professor Ladd Keith is shaping climate solutions worldwide.
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Ladd Keith ’03 ’05 ’19 grew up just miles from the University of Arizona campus in a neighborhood near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base called Terra del Sol — Latin for “land of the sun.” He spent his summers doing what most Tucson kids of his generation did during the summer: Holing up inside to play hours of video games like SimCity — a game that lets players design their own modern metropolises.

But Keith, now an associate professor in the U of A’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, may have become an extreme heat expert despite growing up in Tucson — not because of it. “I never really thought about the heat in the summer, because when you grow up in a place like this, the heat just becomes all you know,” he says.

Read more here: https://alumni.arizona.edu/arizona-magazine/summer-2026/tucson-grown