Liesel Ritchie

Liesel Ritchie is a professor of sociology and an associate director of the Center for Coastal Studies at Virginia Tech. During her career, Ritchie has studied a range of disaster events, including the Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon oil spills, the Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash release, Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand. Since 2000, her focus has been on the social impacts of disasters and community resilience, including conducting social impact assessments, emphasizing technological hazards and disasters, social capital, and rural renewable resource communities. She has published widely on these topics. From 2007 to 2018, Ritchie served as the Natural Hazards Center associate director at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has more than 30 years of experience in research and evaluation and has been PI or co-PI on more than 95 projects and authored or co-authored nearly 100 technical reports working with agencies and organizations, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Feeding America, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Department of the Interior. She is a distinguished senior fellow with Northeastern University's Global Resilience Institute and a visiting scholar at Northumbria University in the UK. Ritchie has also been a National Institute of Standards and Technology Disaster Resilience fellow, a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee for Measuring Community Resilience, and an Advisory Board member for the National Academies Gulf Research Program and LabX.