Our Speakers

Thomas Chandler, Ph.D., is the Managing Director and Research Scientist at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and an Associate Member of the Columbia Climate School faculty, Columbia University. He focuses on post-disaster housing and economic recovery, mass care, pandemic preparedness, and rural and Tribal Nation resilience. He is the Principal Investigator of NCDP's FEMA training projects, managing more than $14 million in funding since 2016. He has led or co-led numerous federally funded investigations, including studies evaluating the public health response to Hurricane Sandy, the role of social media in disaster research, and community resilience following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, as well as work on children's health outcomes and household financial coping in disaster contexts. His research appears in peer-reviewed journals including Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness and The Journal of Social Studies Research, across a portfolio of more than twenty publications spanning the digital divide in school preparedness, climate literacy training and performance measurement for public health preparedness.