Eileen Young

Eileen Young is a technical analyst at Research and Development Corporation, working primarily in the homeland security research area. She holds a PhD in disaster science and management from the University of Delaware, with a dissertation about parasocial relationships and group dynamics in evacuation from building fires. She used archival data to inform agent-based modeling. Evacuation and collective behavior are overarching interests, particularly risk perception and the social psychology and group factors that influence it. Her other interests are mental health, resilience in vulnerable populations, and the evolving role of computing and big data in social science. Everything she touches eventually turns into an Excel spreadsheet, though she has so far managed to avoid that outcome in her hobby of gardening.