An award winning author, Daniel Aldrich is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Northeastern University. His research explores the interaction between social networks, public policy, and the environment and includes comparative politics, nuclear power, disaster recovery, and countering violent extremism. He emphasizes that social capital, rather than wealth or investment in physical infrastructure and repair, is the primary driver of post-disaster recovery. He has also worked on interactions between civil society, social networks, and the state, particularly with regard to the siting of controversial facilities. Aldrich has spent more than five years carrying out fieldwork in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His research and writing have focused on architecture, urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life. House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004) explores the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013), analyzes problems of history and memory in the postindustrial city. Teikoku Nihon no seikatsu kūkan (Iwanami shoten, 2015) examines colonialism in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of material culture, bodily comportment and urban space. He has also written on the comparative history of urban fires and firefighting, the history of Japanese food (including sushi, miso, and MSG), and topics in the study of heritage and museums.

Anuradha Mukherji is Associate Professor of Community and Regional Planning at East Carolina University. Her work is located at the intersection of disaster planning, climate change adaptation, and community resilience, and focuses on two aspects of community planning: 1) the ability of communities to embed disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into the planning of cities, and 2) the institutions and governance structures that shape hazard mitigation and community recovery after disasters. She has conducted research in India and Haiti and more recently in Japan and the United States. Her current work looks at post-disaster land use transitions in Japan through the lens of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Her research uses the Japanese experience to help uncover and explain municipal land use strategies during large-scale land use reorganization after a catastrophic event. She is also engaged in a NOAA funded research that assesses the perceived risks and needs of the hazard management and planning community due to compound water hazards in rural coastal estuarine environments in eastern North Carolina.

Heejun Chang is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Portland State University. My teaching and research interests lie in hydrology and spatial analysis. In hydrology and water resources, I am interested in examining the human modification of the hydrologic system. I examine the complex interactions among climate change, land use change, and water management that drive major changes in water quantity and quality. To understand and model such a complex system, I use an integrated approach that embraces biophysical sciences, social sciences, and information sciences. Hence the use of geographic information technology including geocomputational methods and visual spatial analysis is essential to conduct my research and teaching.

(CHAIR) Professor Mary Alice Haddad’s current work concerns city diplomacy and environmental politics with a focus on East Asia, especially China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Her earlier research focused on civic engagement, democracy, citizenship, volunteering, and nonprofit organizations. She is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Director of the Office of the Faculty Career Development, and Professor of East Asian and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University.