Paula Scalingi, Ph.D.

Executive Director, Bay Area Center for Regional Disaster Resilience

 

ABSTRACT

The past several years have been marked by the elevation of resilience to a national priority and its incorporation into emergency and continuity planning by state and local governments, larger businesses, and many non-profits.  This positive development has resulted in the identification of a myriad of preparedness, response, and recovery research and capability gaps.  Many of these shortfalls are associated with impacts related to complex and still little understood physical/electronic dependencies and interdependences among assets, systems, and supply chains under hazard scenarios or other conditions of stress.  Stakeholders in many major metropolitan areas across the country, including the Bay Area, are joining or already active in various public-private, multidisciplinary collaboratives focusing on improving community and regional resilience.  Some of these multi-stakeholder groups, including sector specific and healthcare coalitions, are holding workshops and exercises to examine primarily first-level interdependencies with government agencies, essential service providers, community and academic institutions.  At the same time, significant constraints—technological and other resource-related, functional, cultural, and political—have impeded development of an integrated regional risk assessment/management approach and supporting capabilities necessary to enable collaborative decision-making and identify, validate, and implement pre and post-disaster mitigation investments.  Dr. Scalingi will highlight the key needs, the constraints, and provide examples of current projects underway, including those of the Bay Area Center for Regional Disaster Resilience, and potential opportunities for collaborative activities to make progress to improve community and regional risk and resilience.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paula Scalingi, Ph.D., Executive Director, Bay Area Center for Regional Disaster Resilience

Dr. Scalingi for the past 17 years has worked with thousands of stakeholders across the nation to improve infrastructure and regional resilience and security.  She currently serves as Executive Director of the Bay Area Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (BACRDR), a non-profit public benefit corporation established to empower and enable stakeholder collaborative action to improve all-hazards disaster resilience.  Since its inception in 2011, BACRDR has assisted Bay Area local and state agencies, private sector and non-profit organizations to develop more than two dozen workshops, exercises, and other training events and implement activities to address resilience gaps.  Dr. Scalingi also is founder and President of The Scalingi Group, LLC, which since 2001 has provided infrastructure security and disaster resilience expertise to Federal, state, and local governments, utilities, and broader private sector and non-profit organizations across the nation and in Canada with particular focus on infrastructure interdependencies and development of capabilities for addressing regional integrated risk.  She in addition is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University where she teaches Community Resilience.

Previous Positions:  A pioneer in the study of infrastructure interdependencies, Dr. Scalingi founded and served from 2006 to 2011 as Director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Regional Disaster Resilience for the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, a consortium of 10 U.S. states and Canadian provinces and territories. Her work focused on development of public-private partnerships and projects to address resilience and security related to energy, cyber security, transportation, manufacturing, communications/IT , health and healthcare, cross-sector information sharing, water systems, supply chains, and dam/levee resilience.  Dr. Scalingi’s  more than 35 years of experience also includes: Director, U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Director of the Decision and Information Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory and of ANL’s Infrastructure Assurance Center, where she was technical liaison to the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, overseeing studies on water supply, emergency services, electric power, oil and gas; legal/regulatory issues, and R&D strategy. She also served in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency on the Strategic Arms Control Treaty Delegation and as Director of Public Information; on the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Other Professional Activities: Dr. Scalingi serves as First Vice-Chair of the Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP), a national association representing organizations in the engineering-related disciplines. She was the integrator and coordinator for TISP’s 2006 Regional Resilience Action Plan Guide and the 2011 edition of the Guide, leading two respective national task forces for this purpose.  Her extensive volunteer work also includes service on the: Steering Group for the Community Resilience System, Board of Directors for SF CARD (San Francisco Community Agencies Responding to Disaster), and DomPrep40 Board of Advisors for the Domestic Preparedness Journal. In recognition of her regional and community resilience contributions, Dr. Scalingi received TISP’s Volunteer of the Year Award for 2010 and again in 2013 for her work as part of the TISP contribution to the revision of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.  Dr. Scalingi regularly speaks nationally and has authored various articles on infrastructure and regional resilience and security issues, community health resilience, and regional risk management.

 

 

Meeting Recording (link coming soon)

Meeting Presentation (link coming soon)

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