Michelle Annette Meyer is director of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center and associate professor in the landscape architecture and urban planning department at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in sociology at Colorado State University. Meyers earned a bachelors from Murray State University.
Meyer's research interests include disaster recovery and mitigation, environmental sociology and community sustainability, and the interplay between environmental conditions and social vulnerability. Particularly, Meyer studies inequality and how disaster and environmental settings intersect with structural forces that maintain or transform inequality. She uses the lens of social capital and collective efficacy to theoretically understand how relationships between individuals and between governmental and nongovernmental organizations generate or hinder disaster risk and recovery. Hence, her interests have led her to research expansively on volunteer organizations, volunteerism, and philanthropy in disaster. Meyer’s dissertation research focused on the interrelation of individual and community resilience and social vulnerability in hurricane-prone communities.
Meyer has worked on various research projects including disaster risk perception, social capital in disaster resilience, nonprofit collaboration for disaster recovery, organizational energy conservation, volunteer training program evaluation, evaluation of disaster response plans for individuals with disabilities, social media use among vulnerable populations, how to increase protective action knowledge in Haiti, citizen science protocols for measuring storm-water condition equity, and environmental attitudes and behaviors. She regularly teaches courses on research methods and statistics, sociology of disaster, environmental sociology, environmental justice, and hazard mitigation and recovery.