Patrick S. Roberts

Patrick S. Roberts is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, with a focus on public management and governance processes. He has substantive expertise in homeland security, intelligence and national security, cybersecurity, disaster risk, and emergency management. His work helps organizations to improve decision-making through collaborative and evidence-based processes, and to navigate risk under conditions of uncertainty.

Roberts is the author of Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected (Cambridge, 2013). He has published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Naval Laboratories, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Social Science Research Council. He serves on the editorial board of Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy and the American Review of Public Administration. 

He has served as a senior foreign policy advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, funded by a Council on Foreign Relations Stanton International Affairs Fellowship. He has also been the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Germany. 

Roberts holds a PhD in government from the University of Virginia. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and another at the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University.