N. Emel Ganapati
Emel Ganapati is an associate professor of public policy and administration and the director of the Laboratory for Social Science Research, International Hurricane Research Center, at Florida International University (FIU). She holds a master’s degree in planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in planning from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Ganapati’s research interests relate to post-disaster disaster recovery and resilience; public participation and community empowerment; and emotional labor of those involved in disaster response and recovery. Her work has been published in top journals, including the Public Administration Review, Journal of the American Planning Association, Administration and Society, Social Science Quarterly, Disasters, Natural Hazards Review, Natural Hazards, Risk Analysis, the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, the International Journal of Emergency Services, and Cooperation and Conflict.
Ganapati has served as the principal investigator (PI) or co-PI of several National Science Foundation projects related to disaster recovery and resilience, including: A Value-Driven Multi-Sector Stakeholder Decision-Making Framework to Support Disaster Resilient Communities; Assessment of Cascading Failures and Collective Recovery of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure in Catastrophic Disasters: A Study of 2015 Earthquake in Nepal; The Resilient Rural America: Drivers of Speedy and High Quality Recovery Following a Disaster; and, Re-Housing Urban Haiti after the Earthquake: The Role of Social Capital. She received the 2012 Top Scholar Award from FIU in recognition of her achievements in research and scholarship. Before this award, she received two awards for her doctoral dissertation: the 2006 Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning (given by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning) and the 2006 Jack Dyckman Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Planning given by her alma mater, University of Southern California.