Meg McPherson has been promoted to Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California, officially earning the title after more than three years of teaching at USC. McPherson announced the promotion in a LinkedIn post, highlighting a career marked by leadership in both academic and operational emergency management roles.
Her contributions have been recognized through faculty honors, including the Bovard College Faculty Excellence in Student Mentoring Award for 2024–2025. She currently serves on the college’s Faculty Council and recently completed the CET Faculty Fellows Leadership Institute.
In addition to her academic work, McPherson is the Director of Emergency Management Education, Training, and Exercises at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. Prior to this, she served for over four years as Emergency Manager and later Director of Emergency Management at Mount Sinai Queens.
McPherson is also the co-founder and co-director of Pracademic Affairs, a platform now hosted by HSToday that empowers homeland security and emergency management professionals to share real-world lessons learned and advance the resilience of communities nationwide.
With a career that spans both practitioner and academic leadership, McPherson also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Tulane University, where she has taught in the Emergency and Security Studies graduate program since 2018. Her teaching portfolio includes courses on emergency management fundamentals, healthcare preparedness, and public policy.
She holds a Master of Public Policy in National Security from The George Washington University, a B.A. in Political Science from the University of New Hampshire, and is an alum of the Naval Postgraduate School’s Executive Leaders Program. McPherson is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), Certified National Healthcare Disaster Professional (NHDP-BC), Certified Healthcare Provider Continuity Professional (CHPCP), as well as a Faculty Fellow Leadership Institute 2024 Cohort issued by the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.
(AI was used in part to facilitate this article.)