Article Out Loud – Applications for a Newly Developed Risk and Resilience Tool

Christina Nunez is a freelance writer based near Washington, D.C.

Kyle Pfeiffer is the director of the Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science within the Decision and Infrastructure Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He leads a multidisciplinary team of national and homeland security professionals conducting applied research to strengthen the security and resilience of people, assets, and systems to an array of global threats and hazards. He leads Argonne’s support to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and manages the Laboratory’s relationship with the Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. He also supports work with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He maintains joint appointments with Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems and the University of Chicago’s Consortium for Advanced Science Engineering. Before joining Argonne, he spent several years as an emergency management consultant – most recently as part of the Justice and Homeland Security team at Booz Allen Hamilton. He also spent four years as an Emergency Medical Technician in Maine, working for hospital-based, university-based, and private ambulance services. He has a B.A. in Political Science, an M.A. in Emergency and Disaster Management, a Master of Criminal Justice, and an M.S. in Science and Technology Leadership from Brown University. He is also a certified Associate Business Continuity Professional (ABCP).

Rao Kotamarthi, Ph.D., is a senior scientist in the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he also serves as a chief scientist. At the University of Chicago, he is a senior fellow at the Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering and holds complimentary positions as an expert at the Energy Policy Research Institute (EPIC). He has a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Iowa and holds a certificate in strategic laboratory leadership program from the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. He has nearly 30 years of experience in regional- and global-scale modeling of Air Quality and Atmospheric Composition, atmospheric aerosols, and regional-scale climate change. His work leverages HPC and applied mathematics to develop models for environmental problems. He has authored over 150 journal articles and technical reports. He serves as a principal investigator for projects funded by DOE on climate and wind energy and private sector entities. He has contributed to the IPCC Assessment Report 2 and serves on peer review panels for DOE, NSF, and NASA. He is the author of a book entitled ​“Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution Climate Projections: From Global Change to Local Impacts.”