Liesel Ritchie

Liesel Ritchie is a professor of sociology, director of the Disaster Resilience Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program, and director of the Disaster Resilience and Risk Management certificate program at Virginia Tech. During her career, Ritchie has studied a range of disaster events, including the Exxon Valdez, BP Deepwater Horizon, and Wakashio oil spills; the Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash release; Hurricane Katrina; and earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand. Since 2000, her focus has been on the social impacts of disasters and community resilience, including conducting social impact assessments, emphasizing technological hazards and disasters, social capital, and rural renewable resource communities. She has published widely on these topics. From 2007 to 2018, Ritchie served as the Natural Hazards Center associate director at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has more than 30 years of experience in research and evaluation and has been Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on more than 100 projects and authored or co-authored more than 100 technical reports working with agencies and organizations, including National American Space Association, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, United States Geological Survey, Federal Emergency Management Agency, United States Department of Agriculture, Feeding America, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Department of the Interior. She is a distinguished senior fellow with Northeastern University's Global Resilience Institute and a visiting scholar at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. Ritchie has also been a National Institute of Standards and Technology Disaster Resilience fellow, a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee for Measuring Community Resilience, and an Advisory Board member for the National Academies Gulf Research Program and LabX.