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Biosketches of Committee Members
Ellis M. Stanley, Sr., Chair, is the former vice president, emergency management, disaster and mitigation at Dewberry, LLC, and has more than 32 years of work experience in emergency management beginning as director of emergency management for Brunswick County, North Carolina, in 1975. Mr. Stanley was selected as the first fire marshal for Brunswick County and served as fire and rescue commissioner and was very involved with hurricane planning and response as well as having developed one of the first fixed nuclear facility plans in the United States following Three Mile Island. Mr. Stanley was appointed in 1982 as the director of the Durham-Durham County Emergency Management Agency where he worked very closely with the world’s largest research park in the North Carolina Triangle area and was heavily involved with hazardous materials planning. In 1987 Mr. Stanley was appointed by the Governor of Georgia as the director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency. While in Atlanta, Mr. Stanley had extensive experience in major event planning (1988 Democratic National Convention (DNC), 1995 Mandela visit, and the 2006 International Olympic Games). He was appointed in 1997 as assistant city administrative officer for the City of Los Angeles and then in 2000 as general manager of the Emergency Preparedness Department for the City of Los Angeles until his retirement in 2007. Mr. Stanley joined Dewberry, LLC, in November 2007 as director of Western Emergency Management Services. In March 2008, he was selected to be the director of DNC planning for the City and County of Denver, Colo-
rado. He received his B.S. in political science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Art Botterell is a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus. His experience in emergency public information and public warning spans more than four decades, including service with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the California Emergency Management Agency, and local public safety and emergency management agencies. Mr. Botterell has served as a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, as well as in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, and with the United Nations Development Programme. He served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) Commercial Mobile Alerting Advisory Committee and a variety of other government and scientific panels, including an National Research Council committee. Mr. Botterell was a founding trustee of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Warning. He has also worked as a broadcast engineer, a journalist, and an online content producer. He originated and guided the development of the Common Alerting Protocol standard.
K. Mani Chandy (NAE) is the Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Dr. Chandy has worked for Honeywell and IBM. From 1970 to 1989, he was in the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas, Austin, serving as chair in 1978-1979 and 1983-1985. He has served as a consultant to a number of companies, including IBM and AT&T Bell Labs. He has been at Caltech since 1987, 2 years as a Sherman Fairchild Fellow and then as a professor in computer science. Dr. Chandy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communication in 1987, the A.A. Michelson Award from the Computer Measurement Group in 1985, and has numerous other awards. Software developed by Dr. Chandy and colleagues in the area of computer performance modeling was marketed by Boole and Babbage, Inc. He was a co-founder of iSpheres in the area of event-driven architecture; that software is now marketed by Avaya. Dr. Chandy does research on sense-and-respond systems. He has published three books and more than 100 papers on distributed computing, verification of concurrent programs, parallel programming languages, and performance models of computing and communication systems. Dr. Chandy received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering at the Operations Research Center in 1969. He received a master’s from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and a bachelor’s from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1965.
Dennis S. Mileti is a recently retired professor and former chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director emeritus of the Natural Hazards Center. Dr. Mileti is author of more than 100 publications, most of which focus on the societal aspects of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery for hazards and disasters. His book Disasters by Design (1999) involved more than 130 experts to assess knowledge, research, and policy needs for hazards in the United States. He has served on a variety of advisory boards and was co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Natural Hazards Review, an interdisciplinary all-hazards journal devoted to bringing together the natural and social sciences, engineering, and the policy communities. Dr. Mileti received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Helena Mitchell is the executive director of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy and principal research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In tandem, she is also the principal investigator (PI) for the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies, funded by the U.S. Department of Education since 2001 to promote equitable access to wireless technologies by people with disabilities and the adoption of universal design in wireless devices. Dr. Mitchell was recruited to Georgia through the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar program that spans educational, community, and business environments. Her areas of specialty include broadband and wireless communications, educational technologies, regulatory and legislative policy, emergency/public safety communications, and universal service to vulnerable, rural, and inner-city populations. Dr. Mitchell has held positions in academia, business, and government, which contribute to her unique ability to see multiple perspectives. This expertise has enabled her to create innovative interdisciplinary technology and educational programs, as well as utilize her unique skill for navigating new waters. Dr. Mitchell has held executive posts in Washington, D.C., with the federal government. At the FCC, she served as the associate chief, strategic communications, for the Office of Engineering and Technology to increase commission dialog with advanced technology companies. Earlier, as the chief of the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), her work resulted in major rulemakings that expanded EBS to include cable, satellite, and advanced communications systems and the adoption of the Emergency Alert System. As a result, her team was selected as the FCC Organization of the Year. Dr. Mitchell previously headed the telecommunications development programs for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she spearheaded executive branch policy initiatives to increase educational, broadcast, and nonbroadcast telecommunications ownership opportunities; advanced joint venture
projects between the education and business sectors; worked on international privatization activities; and was responsible for earmarking more than $50 million dollars in domestic and international grants and loans. In recognition of the success of her policy initiatives in telecommunications, she received the prestigious U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal. Dr. Mitchell received her Ph.D. in telecommunications policy from Syracuse University.
Ramesh R. Rao is the director of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). In 2004, he was appointed the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. Prior to becoming the Calit2 UCSD division director in 2001, he served as the director of UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications. In addition to directing Calit2, Dr. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of interdisciplinary and collaborative research initiatives, leading several major projects at Calit2. He has been a lead investigator on dozens of major federal-, state-, foundation-, defense-, and industry-funded grants, including the National Institutes of Health-funded Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters Self-Scaling Systems for Mass Casualty Management, the Multimedia Telemedical Diagnostic System, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events and ResponSphere projects, and multiple projects involving cognitive networking, as well as leading several international collaborations. He has authored more than 230 peer-reviewed technical papers on a wide range of research topics in wireless communications, including architectures, protocols, performance analysis of computer and communication networks, adaptive systems, energy-efficient communications, disaster management applications, and health-related applications, among others. He is currently engaged in numerous projects to bridge emerging technologies with medicine and healthcare and investigating the power of utilizing information technologies to enhance, even transform, healthcare resources, knowledge bases, and outcomes. Dr. Rao received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Shashi Shekhar is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota (computer science faculty). For contributions to geographic information systems (GIS), spatial databases, and spatial data mining, he received the IEEE-Computer Society (CS) Technical Achieve-
ment Award and was elected an IEEE fellow as well as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow. He was also named a key difference-maker for the field of GIS by the most popular GIS textbook. He has a distinguished academic record that includes more than 260 refereed papers, a popular textbook Spatial Databases (2003), and an authoritative Encyclopedia of GIS (2008). Dr. Shekhar is serving as a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council (2012-2015), a co-editor-in-chief of Geo-Informatica: An International Journal on Advances in Computer Sciences for GIS, a series editor for the Springer-Briefs on GIS, and as a program co-chair for the International Conference on Geographic Information Science (2012). Earlier, Dr. Shekhar served on multiple National Research Council committees, including Future Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence (2011), Mapping Sciences (2004-2009), and Priorities for GEOINT Research (2004-2005). He also served as a general co-chair for the Internaional Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (2011) and the Association for Computing Machinery Geographic Information Systems (1996). He also served on the board of directors of University Consortium on GIS (2003-2004) and was on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and the IEEE-CS Computer Science and Engineering Practice Board. In early 1990s, Dr. Shekhar’s research developed core technologies behind in-vehicle navigation devices as well as web-based routing services, which revolutionized outdoor navigation in urban environments in the last decade. His recent research results played a critical role in evacuation route planning for homeland security and received multiple recognitions including the Center for Transportation Studies Research Partnership Award for significant impact on transportation. He pioneered the research area of spatial data mining via pattern families (e.g., collocation, mixed-drove co-occurrence, cascade), keynote speeches, survey papers, and workshop organization. Dr. Shekhar received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ming-Hsiang (Ming) Tsou is a professor in the Department of Geography, San Diego State University. He received a B.S. from National Taiwan University in 1991, an M.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1996, and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2001, all in geography. His research interests are in mapping cyberspace and social media, Internet mapping, Web GIS applications, mobile GIS and wireless communication, and cyberinfrastructure with grid and cloud computing technology. He has applied his research interests in wildfire mapping, environmental monitoring and management, habitat conservation, K-12 education, and homeland border security. He is co-author of the book Internet GIS and has served on the editorial boards of Annals of GIS (since 2008) and The Professional Geographer (since 2011). Dr. Tsou
was the chair of the Cartographic Specialty Group (2007-2008) and the chair of Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group (2012-2013) in the Association of American Geographers. Dr. Tsou served on the 2006 committee on “Research Priorities for the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science.” In 2007, he created and maintained an interactive Web-based mapping services for San Diego Wildfires 2007. In 2010, Dr. Tsou served as the PI of a NSF-CDI-funded project, “Mapping ideas from Cyberspace to Realspace.”
