Natural Hazards Resilience Speakers Series: Dr. Branda Nowell, “Wildfire Vulnerability and Creating more Fire-Resilient Communities”

Dr. Nowell will discuss the past wildfire season and her work assessing community resilience to wildfires. Additional topics discussed will include the role of firefighters in response to wildland fires, to include organizational strategies employed.

Nowell is an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University specializing in inter-organizational relationships, social networks and community capacity for multi-agent collaboration and coordination within complex problem domains.  As an interdisciplinary scholar, she integrates community and organizational psychology with public management to better understand community-based networks of public and nonprofit agencies working in a common problem domain.  She currently co-leads a research team focused on advancing the science of adaptive capacity toward more disaster resilient communities. Since 2008, this team has worked in collaboration with the US Forest Service on research aimed to improve inter-agency coordination and communication during large scale wildfire events.