Presentation Title: Operationalizing Resilience One Community at a Time (links to pdf)
Date and Time: Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 2:30 pm
Abstract: At the Resilient America program at the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, we work with four communities across the United States to help them design and build resilience programs that satisfy their community’s particular needs. This effort employs a mix of expert volunteers of the National Academy members, members of the Resilient America round table, and a local “ground team” comprised of local academicians, local government, local private sector, and non-governmental organizations. The Resilient America program works with a bottom up point of view. As unbelievable as it sounds, Resilient America was able to achieve success in all four communities. This result is remarkable due to their differences, different approaches, their different priorities, and their different understandings of and needs for resilience. This gives the Resilient America program, as well as others interested in operationalizing resilience, great hope for taking tenets and concepts of resilience from the academic realms into practice as an effort well worth undertaking.
Biography: Lauren Alexander Augustine is the director of the Program on Risk, Resilience, and Extreme Events in the Office of Special Projects in the Division of Policy and Global Affairs and serves as the associate executive director of the Division of Earth and Life Studies. In this role, she directs the Resilient America Roundtable and the International Forum on CBRN Resilience. She is also the staff lead for the cross-Academies Resilience Working Group. She joined the Academy in 2002.
Alexander Augustine serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Risk and Resilience and is a member of the advisory board for the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange program. In her tenure at the Academies, Alexander Augustine was a study director on the Water Science and Technology Board; from 2007-2014, she served as the Country Director for the African Science Academy Development Initiative (ASADI), a cross-academies program that builds scientific capacity in national academies of science in eight African countries. From 2008-2013, she directed the Disasters Roundtable. Her most recent positions entail her developing a portfolio on natural disasters and ways that science can inform policy to reduce the risk and elevate society’s resilience to them.
Lauren earned her B.S. in applied mathematics and systems engineering and her Master’s degree in environmental planning and policy from the University of Virginia; she completed her Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary program that combined physical hydrology, geomorphology, and ecology from Harvard University.
