David Abramson

New York University Associate Professor David Abramson is the founding director of NYU’s Program on Population Impact, Recovery and Resilience (PiR2) and a faculty member of NYU’s College of Global Public Health. Previously, Abramson was the Deputy Director at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute. 

Abramson has led a number of research studies examining the long-term impacts of disasters on communities and on vulnerable populations, including work after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Abramson is presently leading an NSF-funded RAPID study of the Zika virus and risk perception, as well as an NIH-funded recovery study of Katrina survivors. He was also recently appointed co-chair of the Institute of Medicine’s Standing Committee on rapid disaster science. 

Among his research-to-action initiatives, Abramson and Lori Peek co-direct the SHOREline youth empowerment project, a curricular project-based learning program presently operating in a number of Gulf Coast and New York City high schools.

In addition to the disaster recovery work related to Katrina, Sandy, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Abramson has studied short-term post-tornado community recovery in Joplin, Missouri, disaster recovery planning in four mid-sized US cities, risk communication strategies, and organizational and attitudinal aspects of disaster preparedness. Prior to entering the field of public health, he spent a decade as a national magazine journalist, having worked at or written for such publications as Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside magazines, among others.