Nicole Boothman-Shepard

Nicole Boothman-Shepard advises governments and industry on strategic enterprise risk reduction. As a resilience strategist, Boothman-Shepard assists clients in optimizing strategic financial investments in infrastructure and buildings, as well the provision of essential government services before and after major and catastrophic shocks from extreme weather events. She is a nationally recognized expert in U.S. federal funding and policy for disaster recovery and resilience, and has enabled her clients to leverage over $6 billion in federal disaster funds for resilient infrastructure and capital assets for roads, bridges, tunnels, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, and community-based assets from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Highway Administration, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Boothman-Shepard is a skilled facilitator known for simplifying highly complex financial, regulatory, policy, and engineering matters and brokering robust agreements known for balancing risk with innovation.

Before major shocks, she works with communities to identify vulnerabilities and opportunities for risk reduction to avoid or attenuate impacts and mitigate chronic climate, economic, and social stressers. After a major or catastrophic event, she advises on response and long-term recovery and focuses on assessing damage impacts, facilitating holistic recovery planning, negotiating maximum eligible funding, advancing transformative recovery, and structuring program management to truncate recovery time while promoting the best value decisions.

Boothman-Shepard has supported client response and recovery on Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Sandy, tornado events in Greensburg and Joplin, and flooding in Louisiana, Colorado, Calgary, and Tennessee and is currently conducting research for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program to develop a resilience guidebook on procurement and contracting strategies that address concurrent failures of multiple critical transportation corridors within a region. She supports clients with $500 million to $2 billion in disaster damages or more than $5 billion in assets at risk.