Natural Hazards Observer
| July 2006 | Volume XXX | Number 6 |
Congratulations to 2006’s Mary Fran Myers Scholarship Winners
The Natural Hazards Center is pleased to announce the 2006 winners of the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship: Aurélie Brunie, Elenka Jarolimek, and Alessandra Jerolleman. The scholarship recognizes outstanding individuals who are committed to disaster research and practice and have the potential to make a lasting contribution to reducing disaster vulnerability. It was established to ensure that all sectors of the hazards community are represented at the Center’s annual workshop. Due to an increase in applicants and the excellent quality of applications this year, the Center has awarded three scholarships for 2006.
Aurélie Brunie is a PhD candidate in city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Originally from France, she has an engineering degree from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon and a master of science in environmental pollution control from Pennsylvania State University. Brunie specializes in social capital, collective action, empowerment, and disasters, focusing on how assistance programs can take advantage of existing structures to achieve more equitable and sustainable outcomes.
Elenka Jarolimek is the emergency management specialist at the University of Washington in Seattle. She comanaged the university’s “Report on Emergency Preparedness for Special Needs Populations” and is now working on designing a model mitigation program to help departments and college units address seismic and storm-related risks and developing preparedness training programs for students, staff, and faculty. Jarolimek has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Metropolitan State College of Denver and a master’s in urban planning from the University of Washington.
Alessandra Jerolleman works on mitigation, community outreach, and disaster planning at the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response, and Technology at the University of New Orleans (UNO). She has worked on projects benefiting the New Orleans area, including benefit-cost analyses for retrofitting university buildings, flood mitigation planning for suburban neighborhoods, and identifying and implementing outreach projects for the Disaster Resistant University project. Jerolleman is completing a master’s in public administration at UNO and will begin work on a PhD in urban studies in the fall.
Congratulations to all and many thanks to Mary Fran Myers, a former codirector of the Natural Hazards Center and a major guiding force for the Center as well as the broader hazards community. Based on her request, scholarship funds are used to bring individuals to the workshop who otherwise might not be able to attend. A gift account has been established with the University of Colorado Foundation. Contributions can be sent to Mary Fran Myers Scholarship, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, 482 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0482. Make checks payable to the “ University of Colorado Foundation.” Visit www.colorado.edu/hazards/scholarship/ for more information.
2006 Student Paper
Competition Winners
The Natural Hazards Center is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Hazards and Disasters Paper Competition for Undergraduate and Graduate Students. This year’s submissions reflect the truly interdisciplinary nature of this competition. Papers were received from students studying city and regional planning and policy; disaster and emergency management; engineering science in crisis, risk, and emergency management; environmental studies; geography; history and philosophy of science; mass communication; public affairs; and structural engineering. Topics included Hurricane Katrina, drought, preparedness, flooding, interorganizational processes, earthquakes, and looting.
Papers were judged primarily on originality and content. The winning papers presented a well-organized and logical argument that was engaging and demonstrated the authors’ knowledge and ability to integrate a broad scope of resources and references on a topic. Lindsey Barnes from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs took home the undergraduate award for “Public Perceptions of Flash Flood False Alarms: A Denver, Colorado Case Study,” which looked at perceptions among Denver floodplain residents and identified how gender and age affects their perceptions of false alarms. Brooke Fisher Liu from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took home the graduate award for “Preparing the People,” a content analysis of the 50 state emergency management Web sites that identified markers of effective electronic government. Read the winning papers at www.colorado.edu/hazards/SPC/. The 2007 call for papers will be announced in January.
Calling All Students:
Get Online with Disaster Grads!
If you are a student studying hazards and disasters, you should be on Disaster Grads, where you can stay up to date with regular postings of calls for papers, announcements about assistantships and fellowships, news about programs, conferences and workshops, and information inquiries. Disaster Grads is an e-mail listserv for informal discussion and information sharing among undergraduate and graduate students who do research in the area of hazards and disasters. The list is a great way to exchange information with other students with similar interests and to ask for and share support and resources. Disaster Grads currently has more than 470 subscribers representing 24 countries, numerous academic institutions, and a variety of departments and programs, such as geography, engineering, public health, sociology, and economics.
To subscribe, send an e-mail to listproc@lists.colorado.edu with the message “subscribe disaster_grads [first name] [last name]” (Example: subscribe disaster_grads John Doe) and read the guidelines and rules of conduct, which are available at www.colorado.edu/hazards/special_projects/disastergrads.htm. To offer feedback, ask questions, and/or express concerns, contact the list moderator, Christine Bevc, at (303) 492-0428 or christine.bevc@colorado.edu.