Louise Comfort

Louise K. Comfort is professor emerita and former director or the Center for Disaster Management, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and received the 2020 Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement, Section on International Comparative Administration, American Society for Public Administration. Her recent books include The Dynamics of Risk: Changing Technologies and Collective Action in Seismic Events, Princeton University Press, 2019; Global Risk Management:The Role of Collective Cognition in Response to COVID-19, Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Mary Lee Rhodes; and Hazardous Seas: A Sociotechnical Framework for Early Tsunami Detection and Warning, Island Press, 2023, co-edited with H.P. Rahayu. She studies the dynamics of decision making in response to urgent events: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfire, and COVID-19.