In July, I had the opportunity to attend the 41st Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Broomfield, CO. I participated in a session entitled “Advances in Measuring Economic Resilience to Disasters,” where I shared some of the preliminary findings from work that Glenn College colleague Noah Dormady and doctoral student Kim Young are working on to examine resilience decision-making within middle market firms. We implemented a structured online experimental survey to examine how decisions to invest in longer-term stability are affected by the gender of the decision maker and the gender composition of firm boards, the influence of repeated events, and the decisions to invest in information.
At the workshop (and in my session), I had an opportunity interact with USC Sol Price School of Public Policy Research Professor Adam Rose. Professor Rose will be one of the invited out-of-town guest experts at the SRE seed grant-funded Resilience Workshop on October 27th and 28th at Ohio State. In Broomfield, I also had an opportunity to meet with one of the top candidates for City and Regional Planning’s SRE position in Disaster Planning & Resilience. The morning of my session, I also had the pleasure of participating in the Disaster Dash 5k, which served as a fundraiser for the William Averette Anderson Fund, which seeks to increase representation of minorities in the field of disaster and hazard research and practice.