Current Work: Senior Associate of Community Mobilization, American Red Cross, disaster risk management
A spring 2014 graduate of SCARP, I am a researcher and planner in the area of community disaster risk management. Currently I am a senior associate in community mobilization at the American Red Cross working on a variety of projects, including: community resilience building in the Gulf Coast, multi-agency coordination planning in community recovery operations and a national home fire prevention and preparedness campaign.
My experiences at SCARP have served as an invaluable foundation for my current work, especially in connecting research and practice. I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Stephanie Chang on a business disruption study modeling potential economic impacts of an earthquake to North Vancouver, conducted in collaboration with the District of North Vancouver and Natural Resources Canada. Our findings formed the core of my thesis research, which investigated linkages between risk assessment, perception and preparedness behavior, and culminated in a collaborative development and implementation of business and employer emergency preparedness initiative with the North Shore Emergency Management Office. Study findings were presented at the 10th U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, and a paper summarizing thesis findings was selected by the Natural Hazards Center (University of Colorado at Boulder) as the 2014 Hazards and Disasters Paper Competition graduate award winner. While at SCARP I was also a recipient of the Emergency Preparedness Conference Award and H. Peter Oberlander Medal.
During this same period I had the opportunity to study natural catastrophe management at the University of Iceland and participate in two local resilience building projects as part of the UNISDR Making Cities Resilient campaign.
Previously I earned a BA in Anthropology and International Studies at Denison University in the US, where my thesis research focused on social factors affecting disaster vulnerability and recovery capacity. I also worked in supply chain policy in Washington, DC before attending SCARP.
