Lauren Clay

Lauren Clay is a disaster scientist and public health researcher. She is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Emergency Health Services at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on individual, household, and community health impacts of disasters. Her expertise is in disaster disruption to the local food environment and food and nutrition insecurity. From 2018 to 2020, she was an early-career research fellow with the National Academies Gulf Research Program to study the post-disaster food environment. In 2021, she was awarded National Science Foundation CAREER and Convergence Accelerator awards to bolster food system resilience to disasters. She is the inaugural climate and health scholar with the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities. She has a PhD in disaster science and management from the University of Delaware and a master's of public health from Drexel University.