She left Denmark to reinvent herself at FIU. It worked

Former FIU cross-country runner Emilie Christiansen says the ground beneath her feet has always been level, even if life has not.

Her native Denmark features only gentle, rolling plains and cultivated fields. And South Florida – where she moved as an undergraduate and today lives as a doctoral student – lies low to the sea.

“Both places are extremely flat,” she says, Denmark being among the top 10 flattest countries in the world, and Florida the single flattest state in the union.

Christiansen thinks a lot about topography these days. Conducting research in the field of criminology, she examines how hills and steep streets impact burglary and theft.

Her theory: Elevation, or its lack, has an influence on crime.

Put another way: If the bad guys face an escape that involves a tough incline, they likely won’t try in the first place.

The premise appears to hold in her study comparing bicycle theft in San Francisco, with its vertically winding roads, and Copenhagen. The incidence of such larceny in the U.S. city is tiny in proportion to the Danish capital, although other factors are also in play.

The technique of “crime mapping” – analysis that utilizes geographic information system (GIS) to plot the distribution of crimes – has become a specialty for Christiansen, who slid into it by happenstance and is drawn to the visual storytelling aspect.

She arrived in Miami in the fall of 2020 with an undergraduate degree in law from her homeland that did not fulfill all requirements for a degree at FIU. So, the cross-country coach who recruited her decided that criminal justice would be a fit.

“I didn’t actually really pay attention,” she says of how the major got assigned to her, “and I just fell in love with it.”

Stolen bikes notwithstanding, Denmark has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. The promise of studying criminal activity never figured into her decision to attend FIU.

Outrunning a false narrative

Instead, she came to campus to escape an identity she says did not reflect her true self.

As a teen, Christiansen had experienced serious illness that was not immediately diagnosed. She eventually spent two months in the hospital as doctors determined she suffered from celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that damages the small intestine following ingestion of gluten.

“And even though I recovered, I was doing well, I was running, I was doing my bachelor’s,” she says, “I kind of felt like everyone was still looking at me as that ‘sick girl.’”

She was having none of it.

“I was like, I’ve got to try to do something to get out of this, because I felt like I was taking on that identity. I needed a fresh start.”

Already running competitively at home – an activity that often elicited concern from family and friends worried about her health – she investigated how to connect with team coaches overseas and landed at FIU.

Christiansen went on to earn a BS in 2022 and won the academic excellence award presented to the undergraduate who achieves the highest GPA among graduating student-athletes in any sport at the university. She followed up with an MS in 2023 in the same discipline, all the while running 60-70 miles per week as part of physical training. (Women’s collegiate cross-country competitions typically cover six kilometers, or 3.73 miles.)

Going the distance

The race to earn a doctoral degree began when Stephen Pires, an associate professor of criminology and an expert on crime mapping, approached her.

Christiansen had enrolled in his Ph.D.-level course on geospatial crime analysis and, as one of just a few master’s students in the class, quickly lapped the competition.

“She outperformed everybody,” Pires says. “GIS is a tricky software that no one really had experience with coming into the class, but she did really, really well. She was getting the best grade every week. But I also saw that she was very ambitious and willing to go the extra mile and did way more than what was expected. And that's where I saw her drive.”

He invited her to work on two projects, one examining illegal fishing on a global scale, as he mentored her and taught her advanced spatial techniques that will serve her in the field. She has since published a research article on her own, and the two together have published another with still others under editorial review.

Planning to cross the finish line next spring, she hopes to secure an academic position that will allow her to continue both her research and teaching in the classroom, which she has also been doing at FIU. By then she will have acquired all the high-level education and credentials to succeed in whatever position comes her way, and she will have firmly established something else: a reputation that matches the capable, confident individual she always recognized in herself.

“I’m so happy I’ve become the person that I’ve become,” she says. “This has all been transformative.”