Mary Angelica Painter

Dr. Mary Angelica Painter is a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center. Mary Angelica’s work focuses on understanding and engaging socially vulnerable populations in the context of natural hazards, particularly as it relates to policy, politics, and government. She started in the hazards and disasters field researching the political implications of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico and the role of clientelism and corruption in the context of disasters. Her work now incorporates a variety of related topics, such as hazard gentrification and the electoral consequences of disaster response. Her research is driven by a philosophy of collaboration, where community, decisionmakers, researchers, and everyday people are involved in identifying problems and finding solutions together for those who are in most need. 

At the Natural Hazards Center, Mary Angelica work spans many different topic areas related to social vulnerability as well as geographies. Her seminal work, “A systematic scoping review of the Social Vulnerability Index as applied to natural hazards,” assess the state of the Social Vulnerability Index over nearly 20 years, synthesizing the strengths and limitations of these indices. She has also looked at social vulnerability in the context of state hazard mitigation planning through both quantitative and qualitative approaches. She is currently leading a project on the perspective on emergency alerting for populations with limited-English proficiency, which builds on a project funded by the State of Colorado to assess emergency alerting for non-English speaking populations and those with auditory and visual disabilities. She is also helping to support the development of a drought planning platform with the National Instigated Drought Information Systems (NIDIS) and supporting projects with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Silver Jackets Program. 

Mary Angelica's work also centers energy insecurity, and more broadly, food, energy, and water (FEW) insecurity particularly in Puerto Rico. She has been funded by the Natural Hazards Center to conduct community engaged research around FEW insecurity and public health, including conducting a participatory budgeting project in rural Puerto Rico, as well as developing toolkit for communities to independently understand their specific needs for food, energy, water, and public health. She is continuing to work in Puerto Rico on FEW insecurity through the FEWtures project. 

Mary Angelica has several leadership roles. She serves on as an advisor on both the Tribal Engagement Initiative Advisory Committee through the Association of Floodplain Managers and the Disaster Risk Reduction Advisory Board through the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy. She also serves as a Associate Deputy Editor for Climatic Change, is a CONVERGE Data Ambassador, and is a co-founder of the SOLVER (Social Vulnerability and Resilience) Research Laboratory. Mary Angelica earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a master's degree in international relations from Webster University in Bangkok, Thailand. 

For more on Mary Angelica's publications, experience, grant funding, and more, please see the linked CV. Mary Angelica would also like to thank all the team members at the Natural Hazards Center and her dear friends, Dr. Anaís Delilah Roque and Dr. Sameer H. Shah, for their continued support and collaboration.