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Kathleen Tierney

Kathleen Tierney is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has a long record of collaborating with engineers and scientists on disaster loss-reduction research, particularly through her sixteen-year involvement with the research committee and the executive committee of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research. She is honored to have been selected as the EERI Distinguished Lecturer for 2006. An EERI member since 1987, she has served on the editorial board of Earthquake Spectra, and she has also served for many years on EERI~Rs Learning from Earthquakes Committee. In addition to her duties with the Hazards Center and MCEER, Tierney is a also co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a DHS "Center of Excellence" headquartered at the University of Maryland. Her role in START includes coordinating the activities of the START working group on the societal dimensions of terrorism, focusing on such topics as risk perception and communication; household, organizational, and community terrorism preparedness within the U. S.; and behavioral and psychosocial consequences of terrorism. Prior to her move to Colorado in 2003, she was Professor of Sociology and Director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. With over twenty-five years of experience conducting research on social and behavioral responses to extreme events, she has studied the social aspects and impacts of major earthquakes in California and Japan, floods in the Midwest, Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, and many other natural and technological disaster events. After September 11, 2001, she directed a study on the organizational and community response in New York following the attack on the World Trade Center. Her other current and recent research includes studies on risk communication, the business impacts of disasters, the use of information technologies in disaster response, and community preparedness networks for extreme events. Tierney is the author of dozens of publications. Her most recent publication, a book chapter entitled "Social Inequality, Hazards, and Disasters", appears in the 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press book, On Risk and Disasters: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina. Tierney is a member of the National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee, which oversaw the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently completed investigation of the World Trade Center disaster. She was a co-author of the NEHRP plan for post-earthquake investigations and a member of the Project Management Committee for the FEMA/NIBS/MMC study on savings from mitigation. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences. Her work on the World Trade Center attack and her career in disaster research were profiled in the New York Times Science Times section in September 2004, as part of that newspaper~Rs coverage of the anniversary of 9-11. In addition to disaster research, she also specializes in the study of collective behavior and social movements as well as qualitative research methods.

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