Progress and Pitfalls in Creating a Disaster Research Program
I was delighted to read Katie Picchione and Lauren Finegan’s article, “The Case for a National Disaster Research Strategy” (Issues, Summer 2025). This is an important recommendation that warrants support from emergency management practitioners and academics alike.
I’ve had a unique vantage point to observe the progress and pitfalls of creating a research program for the emergency management community. My first exposure came when I was appointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Advisory Council in late 2022. I found that the council’s annual report that year recommended the establishment of an “Office of Disaster Research” within the institution that would become the National Disaster and Emergency Management University (NDEMU), charged to “review, aggregate, and solicit disaster research and lessons learned to update curricula and circulate knowledge to the emergency management community rapidly.”
Then in late 2023 I became president of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) USA Council, where I had the opportunity to review an initial policy proposal by Picchione and Finegan to create this emergency management research agenda. Their plan was compelling and aligned perfectly with the association’s efforts to professionalize the field and support the newly renamed and resource-enhanced NDEMU. The proposal was presented to IAEM’s Government Affairs Committee to gauge how emergency management practitioners would respond. The community was largely receptive, but given Congress’s proposed cuts to federal emergency management grants, the committee deemed responding to the new fiscal challenges a more critical policy priority for 2024.
As the federal role in emergency management potentially contracts, a national entity capable of spanning across jurisdictions must be positioned to administer a national research program.
Although I understood the community’s concern, I believed that focusing solely on the immediate would continue to impede our ability to develop a more effective, evidence-backed emergency management system. Today, the situation has become even more urgent. Since the beginning of 2025, the emergency management enterprise has been in a state of turmoil, with abrupt reductions in federal grant funding, staff reductions at FEMA, and policy shifts that would place a greater burden of disaster management on states and localities. There have even been threats to eliminate FEMA entirely.
With federal initiatives such as the Department of Government Efficiency actively seeking out fragmented and disjointed programs, a clear opportunity arises to implement a unified and coordinated disaster research agenda. This would enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the limited resources allocated to this vital area. Given these circumstances, a national disaster research strategy is more crucial than ever and should be considered a critical function of what remains in a “downsized” FEMA.
As the federal role in emergency management potentially contracts, a national entity capable of spanning across jurisdictions must be positioned to administer a national research program. FEMA is uniquely suited to understand the research needs across the country, capture data and observations from disaster-stricken communities, and translate evidence-based knowledge into actionable strategies for other jurisdictions to reduce disaster risk. This kind of essential, high-level coordination and knowledge translation is championed by the authors, and it is a role that only a federal entity can effectively perform to ensure a resilient nation.
Justin Kates
Past President, IAEM USA Council (2023–2024)
Former Member, FEMA National Advisory Council (2022–2025)
Katie Picchione and Lauren Finegan make clear the importance of coordinated approaches for reducing risks to communities and infrastructure associated with disasters. They overlook, however, a key research community that already does much of what they describe: the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) network.
NHERI comprises 12 independent but tightly entwined facilities that work together to understand, predict, prevent, and mitigate the effects of natural hazards. With federal funding primarily from the National Science Foundation but also from more than a dozen government agencies, NHERI provides large-scale experimentation, simulation, reconnaissance, social science, and cyberinfrastructure expertise along with access to resources, tools, a data repository, and high-performance computers.
As the authors point out, it is imperative that our community do more than conduct research. And indeed, NHERI actively conveys outcomes to broader audiences that can implement findings and save lives. Our collaboratory mitigates the risks of natural hazards through research, dissemination, education, and training. Our Technology Transfer Committee connects researchers to code writers, policy developers, and community and social influencers who change regular practice. Workshops, webinars, and training across NHERI facilities transfer lessons learned to those who are actively practicing in the field.
Our collaboratory mitigates the risks of natural hazards through research, dissemination, education, and training.
As a community, NHERI has developed an ambitious Science Plan to guide future natural hazards research and has partnered internationally to leverage expertise and resources. We also lean into various educational pathways—hosting a geographically distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates program (which has achieved 100% retention of students within their major after completing the program); a Graduate Student Council with more 700 members internationally; and a Summer Institute for early-career researchers. There is an array of descriptions of NHERI impacts (journal articles, a NHERI Impact book, tech transfer special collections, and so on) that are too numerous to cite here.
NHERI just completed its first 10 years of building community, translating research, and laying the path for generations of natural hazards engineers and scientists to tackle the grand challenges detailed in our Science Plan. We are gearing up for the next 10 years, as announced in an NSF Dear Colleague Letter, to expand our reach—in terms of the disasters we help mitigate, the disaster-related community groups with whom we partner, the international communities with whom we collaborate, and the policymakers with whom we engage. By the nature of our research on the built environment and associated communities, the results of NHERI work can impact every person in a community struck or threatened by a disaster event.
Although NHERI is well known in the engineering community, we are expanding awareness in the sciences. We need to find the information hubs that Picchione and Finegan—and Issues’ readers—use to stay informed, and make sure that the work of NHERI scientists and engineers is known, understood, and integrated so it can meaningfully help more of the nation’s neighborhoods and municipalities. We invite all to join our community and help make sure this vision is realized to its full potential.
JoAnn Browning
The author is collectively representing researchers in the NHERI community