EP #66 - Race, Emergency Management & Pandemic , DeeDee Bennett and Njoki Mwarumba

Today, we have a discussion of COVID-19, race, and emergency management with DeeDee Bennett and Njoki Mwarumba.

DeeDee  Bennett is an Assistant Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests include emergency management, socially vulnerable populations during disasters, emergency communications, disaster policy, and mobile wireless communications.  She broadly examines the influence and integration of advanced technologies on the practice of emergency management, and for use by vulnerable populations.

Dr. Bennett received her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in Fire and Emergency Management. In addition to bringing expertise in emergency management, she has a unique academic background having received both her M.S. in Public Policy and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is an Advisory Board Member for the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM).

Early in her Ph.D. graduate studies at Oklahoma State University, Njoki Mwarumba briefly worked with a USAID funded consultancy team. The team was funded to develop a national pandemic preparedness plan for Kenya in collaboration with Kenyas National Disaster Operation Centre. During that consultancy a colleague recommended the book 'The New Plagues': Pandemics and Poverty in a Globalized world' by Stefan Kaufmann. The confluence of these two events resulted in Njoki's  dedicated focus on understanding how people, systems and institutions interact with public health disasters and pandemics. Her dissertation focus was on the role social vulnerability indicators played during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009.

Dr. Njoki Mwarumba now teaches Emergency Management and Disaster Science at the University of Nebraska Omaha.