Appendix A

Planning Committee Member Biographies

Arrietta Chakos (Chair) is a consultant in urban resilience policy. Her specialties include disaster risk assessment, disaster loss estimates, public policy development, multi-party negotiations, and municipal government operations. She served as director of the Acting in Time Advance Disaster Recovery project at the Harvard Kennedy School, which was involved with disaster policy research and application. A seismic safety advocate, she was assistant city manager in Berkeley, California, until 2007 and managed the city’s intergovernmental coordination and hazard mitigation initiatives. She directed California’s first municipal hazard mitigation plan aimed at sustainable risk reduction. Berkeley’s mitigation efforts are nationally recognized and use innovative tax incentives and locally funded programs to promote community resilience. Chakos worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its report to the U.S. Congress on all hazard risk mitigation, and with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalEMA) on natural hazards projects and seismic safety legislation. She served as a technical advisor to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on its international seismic safety program for schools; the World Bank on disaster risk reduction and sustainable development in the metropolitan Istanbul region; and with the National Research Council’s research on community disaster resilience. She has also advised on a recent Ford Foundation study on Stafford Act implementation in the Gulf Coast region; as well as with the Association of Bay Area Governments; the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute;

GeoHazards International; the Center for Biosecurity; and the Natural Hazards Center on disaster policy issues. Publications include papers on disaster risk reduction for technical conferences; the American Society of Civil Engineers; Spectra, an engineering professional publication; the Natural Hazards’ Observer; the United Nations journal, Regional Development, and as a contributor to Keeping Schools Safe in Earthquake Country (OECD, 2004) and Global Warming, Natural Hazards, and Emergency Management (2009). She received a B.A. from California State University, Humboldt, and an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School.

William D. Solecki is professor and chair of the Department of Geography at Hunter College – CUNY and serves as the interim director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, which seeks to create awareness and understanding of the connections between the everyday lives of urban citizens and their natural world, leading to the discovery and use of cities like New York as a learning laboratory to create a sustainable future for cities worldwide. He has served on several National Research Council committees including the Special Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE). He currently is a member of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Megacity Study Group and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP), Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Scientific Steering Committee. He currently serves as the co-leader of several climate impacts and land use studies in the New York metropolitan region, including the Metropolitan East Coast Assessment of Impacts of Potential Climate Variability and Change. He holds in degrees in geography from Columbia University (B.A.) and Rutgers University (M.A., Ph.D.).

Linda Langston is the director of strategic relations for the National Association of Counties in Washington, DC. Langston previously served on the Linn County Board of Supervisors from 2003 to 2016, where she chaired Linn County Public Health, East Central Iowa Council of Governments and the Metropolitan Planning Organization, among others. Langston is a former president of the National Association of Counties (NACo). Her presidential initiative was Resilient Counties, which focused on building communities’ capacity to be ready, resilient, agile, and adaptive in the face of natural, manmade, and economic disasters. Her home county was devastated by flooding in 2008. Also during her time at NACo, she served as chair of the Health Steering Committee, chair of the Healthy Counties Advisory Board, chair of the Finance Committee and chair of the Arts and Culture Commission. Her outstanding leadership in arts and culture earned

her the 2009 Americans for the Arts’ Public Official of the Year Award. Langston is a member of the Resilient America Roundtable for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Advisory Council for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Born in Chicago and raised in Iowa, Langston graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, with a degree in history. She is a 2007 graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for State and Local Officials.

Lucile M. Jones was a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a visiting research associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech since 1983. She recently retired as science advisor for risk reduction in the Natural Hazards Mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), where she led long-term science planning for natural hazards research. She also led the SAFRR Project: Science Application for Risk Reduction to apply USGS science to reduce risk in communities across the nation. In 2006, Jones created and led the innovative Multi Hazards Demonstration Project (MHDP) in Southern California that integrated hazard science with economic analysis and emergency response to increase resilience to natural disasters. Major products of MHDP included the ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario and the Great California ShakeOut, a public emergency preparedness event involving more than 8 million people; the ARkStorm scenario, a model of a great storm in California; and the Southern California Debris Flow Warning System (in partnership with the National Weather Service). Prior to creating the MHDP, Jones was the scientist-in-charge of the Pasadena office of the USGS’ Earthquake Science Center. Jones has authored more than 90 papers on research seismology with primary interest in foreshocks and earthquake hazard assessment, especially in southern California. Her research has been the basis of all earthquake advisories issued by the State of California, providing the probabilities of future damaging earthquakes during earthquake sequences. She serves on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and was a commissioner of the California Seismic Safety Commission from 2002 to 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Alquist Award from the California Earthquake Safety Foundation, Woman of the Year from the California Science Center, and the Shoemaker Award for Lifetime Achievements in Science Communication from USGS. Jones received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese language and literature, Magna Cum Laude, from Brown University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.

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