Laurie Pearce

Laurie Pearce is a practitioner, an educator, and a researcher, living in North Vancouver, British Columbia. She currently teaches in the field of emergency management and business continuity at the University of Victoria and the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) for certificate and undergraduate degrees. She also teaches in the Master of Disaster and Emergency Management at Royal Roads University, in emergency management at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in emergency management and critical incident stress management at JIBC.

Pearce was the research chair at JIBC, managing the SIMTEC project, which focused on developing identifying stressors in emergency operations centers for first responders and others and developing strategies to support them. Pearce’s current research focuses on the impacts of disasters on evacuated households, particularly those impacting indigenous communities, on the evaluation of provincial governments’ initial response to COVID-19, and her work continues regarding the psychosocial impacts of disasters on first responders. In addition, Pearce has extended her research interests in understanding the effects of flooding on indigenous communities and developing strategies for managing floods using traditional knowledge and benefiting from western technology.

Pearce has been an active volunteer with the Disaster Psychosocial Services (DPS) Program and sits on the British Columbia DPS Council. She maintains a strong sense of community and currently serves on the executive as the secretary for the Woodlands, Sunshine, and Cascades Ratepayers Society and the treasurer of the Sunshine Falls Road Society.