The Resilience Studies program hosts a speaker series annually. This year’s series features speakers from in and out of the university on a variety of topics, and is held once a month on Thursdays at 3:00pm in Renaissance Park 909.
Contact Shannon Usher at s.usher@northeastern.edu for more questions.
RSVP for any or all events in this series here.
January 15
Ryan Destefano
Senior Security Director, Kuerig Dr Pepper
Ryan is the Senior Security Director at Keurig Dr Pepper where he is responsible for leading the enterprise corporate security program. He has 25 years of diverse multi-sector experience in security risk management, security operations and intelligence, and crisis management. Prior to KDP he led all global assistance operations services for On Call International and served in senior security roles with Liberty Mutual Insurance and Procter and Gamble. He currently serves on the board of the International Security Management Association (ISMA) and is a member of their External Relations committee.
Corporate Resiliency: Today’s Reality and Tomorrow’s Challenges—A Practitioner View
In an increasingly volatile and disruptive world, large global companies with interconnected supply chains, need to ensure they adequately plan for foreseeable risks and take reasonable precautions to mitigate those disruptions. Leaning on over 25 years in the security and crisis management sector Ryan will discuss lessons learned from the past, the importance of social networking to crisis management, and how today’s ever changing geo-political and technological landscape is shifting the way we evaluate threats to people, assets, and brand reputation.
February 19
Joan Fitzgerald
Northeastern University
Joan Fitzgerald is a Professor of Urban and Public Policy. She focuses on urban climate action and strategies for linking it to equity, economic development, and innovation. In her fourth book, Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change (Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), she argues that the climate strategies of most cities represent random acts of greenness rather than integrated and aggressive action. She points to leading cities in North America and Europe and offers strategies for cities to accelerate their action. She is leading a team at the Dukakis Center that is conducting an assessment for the Boston Foundation’s Boston Climate Progress Report. The report will assess Boston’s progress on its climate action and resiliency plans with particular focus on equity. She is co-authoring a new book, Cities and the Struggle for Climate Justice. Fitzgerald blogs on urban climate action on Planetizen. She teaches The 21st Century City, Cities, Sustainability & Climate Change, and Intro Environmental Science & Policy.
Powering Resilience: How Eco-Districts Are Redefining Energy Resilience
Cities in Europe, and to some extent North America, have been developing eco-districts that integrate multiple aspects of their climate agenda at a neighborhood scale. They include energy-efficient buildings, district heating and cooling, green stormwater management, deprioritizing cars, and elements of the “15-minute neighborhood.” More recently, these initiatives are focusing on resilient energy systems that reduce vulnerability created by storms, heat waves, fire, and even cyberattacks. And some places are focusing on low-income neighborhoods as part of a climate justice agenda. In addition to their immediate benefits, these initiatives create an exciting vision of what climate resilience looks like to build public support. My presentation examines the intricacies of planning energy resilient districts.
March 19
Brian Falchuk
President & CEO, Property & Liability Resource Bureau (PLRB)
Bryan Falchuk is the President & CEO of Insurance industry trade organization, PLRB, a thought leader in the industry, and the author of the best-selling book series, The Future of Insurance. Bryan spent 25+ years in the insurance industry, including serving an insurer COO and Chief Claims Officer, and leading growth for an insurtech startup. Bryan has also held leadership roles in corporate strategy, operations and distribution, and was a consultant in McKinsey’s insurance practice.
Is This the End of Insurance? How a Traditional Approach to Risk Must Change for the Global Economy to Function
Modern insurance products were largely designed in the 1950, and are finding themselves stretched to the limits of their viability today – for insurers to sell profitably or for consumers to afford. With insurance such an important factor in the functioning of the global economy, something has to change. What factors are challenging the concept of insurance today, and what shifts are necessary to change the situation so people can live their lives with the protection from risk they need? Key discussion points include:
- How have exposures changed over time, and how has the insurance industry traditionally responded to these changes?
- Why is viability in question today?
- What solutions exist to address this issue?
- New insurance products
- Better data accuracy and models to understand the exposures we face
- Moving from Repair & Replace to Predict & Prevent
This is meant to be an interactive session so ideas can build on each other and students engage in and feel ownership of the topic.
April 16
Angela Frederick
University of Texas, El Paso
Angela Frederick is Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at El Paso. In her new book, Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster (NYU Press 2025), Frederick illuminates the impact of Winter Storm Uri and the 2021 Texas power crisis on people with disabilities. Her previous scholarship in the sociology of disability has garnered awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, including the Sex and Gender Section, Race Gender and Class Section, and Disability in Society section. Frederick earned her doctorate in sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012.
Disabled Infrastructure, Disability Resilience: Lessons from Winter Storm Uri & the 2021 Texas Power Crisis
Description TBA
Fall 2025 Speakers
September 25
Pinar Temocin
University of Tokyo, Japan
Dr. Pinar Temocin works at the Institute for Future Initiatives, University of Tokyo, Japan, as a project assistant professor under the Hitachi-UTokyo Lab.She is currently a non-residential visiting fellow at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs, at GeorgeWashington University, USA, and leads the Japan case study as part of GOGREEN, a global research project on the local co-creation of green transitions, led by Roskilde University, Denmark.
Deliberating Energy Policy: Environmental Civil SocietyOrganizations and Their Engagement in Post-Fukushima Japan
This talk examines the major environmental civil society organizations based in Japan that are involved in energy policy, with a particular emphasis on their influence in the energy decision-making process following the Fukushima disaster. It also highlights the socio-political dimensions of energy issues in Japan, including the efficacy of environmental organizations and non-state actors, the deliberative and democratic spaces of civic actors, the interactive dimensions of state-civil society partnerships, and the dynamics of the energy policymaking process in contemporary Japan.
October 9
Scott Gabriel Knowles
Northeastern University
Scott Gabriel Knowles is the Senior Director of Research for the Defense Industrial Base Institute (DIBI) and Research Professor in the Department of History of Northeastern University. Previously he served as Endowed Chair Professor in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), where he also served as Associate Vice President in the International Office. He is a historian of disaster worldwide, focusing on the processes that make disasters possible, and the application of history and public policy to reduce future disasters.
Education for Disaster Justice: The Disaster Haggyo in South Korea
Disasters reveal injustice in society; disasters create new injustices. These two intertwined ideas were the inspiration for an action research project, the first Disaster Haggyo, held across multiple locations in South Korea in the summer of 2022, and again in 2023 and 2024. The Disaster Haggyo— “haggyo” translates to “school” in Korean—was also an experiment in pedagogical methods. The Disaster Haggyo was also created as a method for conducting research on the structural features of disaster injustice, in the mode of “action research,” to enable mutual aid and a dissolution of boundaries among researchers and those seeking disaster justice in two specific sites: Ansan and Jeju Island, South Korea. Specifically, our goal was to document and evaluate the ways in which (1) disaster memorialization and (2) disaster education practices empower survivors and bereaved families, and also the ways that such activities might also burden them, or even cause ongoing harm.
November 13
Beatrice Magistro
Northeastern University
Beatrice Magistro is an Assistant Professor of AI Governance with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington. Her work bridges political science, public policy, and political economy. Her research examines the political and policy implications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and automation, as well as broader questions of political behavior and economic change.
Causal Beliefs About the Economic Effects of AI Among Politicians and the Public
This paper examines potential representational gaps between political elites and the public regarding artificial intelligence’s economic impacts. Through parallel surveys of Canadian local politicians (N=1,100) and the public (N=5,510), we identify four distinct causal theories about AI’s distributional effects on firms, consumers, and workers. Politicians predominantly view AI as complementary to labor, while the public perceives it as substituting workers and reducing product quality. This belief gap persists beyond demographic differences. Compared to the public, politicians favor long-term education and training policies supporting AI adoption rather than inhibitory measures. These findings suggest risks of future political backlash against AI, echoing historical patterns from trade liberalization.
December 11
Katherine Flanigan
Carnegie Mellon University
Katherine Flanigan is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Flanigan also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU. She received her Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020. Her research draws upon tools and technologies from across disciplines to transform traditional civil infrastructure and urban systems into “intelligent” and adaptable cyber-physical systems (CPS).
The Social Life of Infrastructure: Rethinking Built Environments as Human-Centered Systems
We spend the vast majority of our lives in designed spaces and built environments that do more than provide shelter or enable work—they shape how people interact, collaborate, and collectively respond to disruptions. As such, built environments play a critical role in the production of human and social capital by influencing the dynamics of communication, coordination, and well-being. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to designing environments that foster collective productivity and resilience. While advances in sensing and data analytics have transformed our ability to observe human-environment interactions, two aspects remain insufficiently understood: (1) how to model the behavioral and social processes that emerge within built environments; and (2) how to translate these insights into adaptive operational strategies that enhance human outcomes across different contexts. This talk will trace my own trajectory and work in reimagining built environments as systems shaped not only by physical forces but also by human presence and interaction. Through this lens, I will highlight how expanding the boundaries of “monitoring” to include human dynamics can reveal new opportunities to design environments that learn from and adapt to the people within them.