Yajaira Ayala

Yajaira Ayala holds a PhD in disaster science and management from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation “Reframing Reality: Poor Black Women’s experiences with vulnerability and resilience during the recovery process” sheds light on how structural and cultural violence influence the recovery process and demonstrates the complex and layered relationship between vulnerability and resilience.

Born and raised in the northern Mexican-southern Texas border, Ayala's interests lie in understanding how complex and intersecting societal structures generate disasters. As such, Ayala’s has co-develop a special issue in the Disaster Prevention and Management Journal titled “Using Critical Perspectives to Explore Disasters through Shifting Climates,” in this issue she also co-authored an article titled “Positionalities in Disaster Recovery research: reflections from fieldwork across the Gulf South.” From 2023-2024, she was part of the American Evaluation Association’s Graduate Education Diversity Internship. Ayala also became an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Post-doctoral Fellow with the United States Geological Survey. She now works merging research and evaluation as an independent consultant, and as a Program Coordinator for The Bill Anderson Fund.