Several months ago, I was invited by Emergency Management to begin blogging for their new website. I was honored to be asked to contribute to this forum, knowing that the readers of Emergency Management represent the key practitioners in the field of emergency management and homeland security. As an academic I've spent much of my career writing for publication in peer reviewed journals; this is the process by which my colleagues achieve tenure within their universities. However, time and time again I've been prodded to translate this research into useful information that can be immediately implemented by practitioners on the ground. This blog serves as one strategy to meet this request. It is my aim to take recent research and translate it for the practitioner community so that it can be applied to your daily work environment.


My area of expertise lies within the study of human collective behavior. I am a disaster sociologist. Among my topics of research interest are systems for alerts and warnings, community preparedness, social networks and collaboration, and resiliency. Most specifically, I work in the area of new media and risk communication in disasters looking at the ways that members of the public make use of Web 2.0 tools to seek and share information in times of crisis. In addition, I spend a great deal of time observing and talking with practitioners who are seeking to implement some of these new technologies to communicate to a public at risk. In general, emergency managers have shown an increased curiosity about new communication channels and are looking for case studies and best practices to inform the strategies they develop and the policies they implement.


As a blogger for Emergency Management, it is my goal to share my thoughts on these emerging issues and to provide an analysis based in more than 100 years of empirical research on human behavior in disaster. While the Emergency Management audience is vast and the questions before us seem daunting, the research shoulders upon which we stand have provided a roadmap for the future.

Jeannette is a Research Associate at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the co-founder of the Center for New Media and Resiliency. For more information about Jeannette and her research on social media and disasters visit http://www.jeannettesutton.com/