Christopher Emrich

Biography

Christopher Emrich is the Boardman Endowed Professor of Environmental Science and Public Administration within the School of Public Administration and Interim Director of UCF’s National Center for Integrated Coastal Research where he works toward equitable and just solutions for myriad coastal challenges through science-based decision making supported by transdisciplinary research.

His research and practical service includes applying geospatial technologies to emergency management planning and practice, long-term disaster recovery analysis, and the intersection of social vulnerability and community resilience in the face of catastrophe.  His background and previous work with FEMA in geospatial support for response and long-term recovery to Puerto Rico and the states of Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, South Carolina and Texas has developed into a research agenda focused on how differential exposure and recovery manifest across from disaster-stricken areas.

Emrich is actively working at pinpointing challenges to equity in disaster recovery and mitigation where he has most recently assisted in building empirically based and result-oriented impacts assessments to inform recovery programs in several states and US territories.  He has remained at the vanguard of theory, data, metrics, methods, applications and spatial analytical model development for understanding in the field of hazard vulnerability science and the often very in-equitable and disproportionate pattern of disaster loss and recovery across communities.