Kirsten Taylor-McCabe, Ph.D., is a Program Manager in the National Security and Defense. and Intelligence and Emerging Threats Program Offices within Global Security at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is also the point of contact for the COVID-19 Modeling Team for DOE’s National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory. Kirsten has spent the past 20 years in technical and programmatic oversight of biodefense projects varying from the detection of biological and chemical threats to novel data stream evaluations for biosurveillance. Kirsten holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biochemistry from Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine and has served in varied Biosecurity Strategic Road mapping efforts. She may be reached at [email protected].
J. Patrick Fitch, Ph.D., is Associate Laboratory Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory responsible for the Chemical, Earth and Life Sciences Directorate and the Special Office for COVID-19 R&D. He also leads the COVID-19 Testing Team for DOE’s National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory. For more than a decade, he directed one of the nation’s largest maximum biocontainment laboratories (BSL-2, 3, and 4) and oversaw the National Biological Threat Characterization Center and the National Bioforensic Analysis Center performing thousands of analyses each year. Pat is a biodefense and infectious disease expert with related experience in computing, medical device design, and the human genome program. Pat has chaired and served on biodefense panels of the National Academies and served on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. He is a Fellow of AAAS and a senior member of IEEE. Pat earned his Ph.D. in Engineering from Purdue University. He may be reached at [email protected].
Andrew Goldsmith was Vice President of Global Marketing at Rapiscan Systems and is now CEO of AGX Marketing (agxmarketing.com), a consulting firm focused on the homeland security technology sector.
Brock Long is the former Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Confirmed in June 2017 by the U.S. Senate with strong bipartisan support (95-4), Brock served as the nation’s principal advisor to the president responsible for coordinating the entire array of federal government resources down through 50 states, 573 tribal governments, and 16 island territories to assist them with executing disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Brock is the 10th Administrator and the youngest to hold the office. While serving as Administrator, Brock coordinated the federal government’s response to over 144 presidentially declared disasters and 112 wildfires, including three of the nation’s most devastating hurricanes and five of the worst wildfires ever experienced. During this time, nearly $44 billion of disaster activity occurred under the various federal recovery programs.
As the FEMA Administrator, Brock led major initiatives that will have long-lasting impacts on the emergency management community. He rapidly transformed the agency’s business enterprise by implementing innovative Community Lifeline and FEMA Integration Team concepts to strengthen public-private partnerships and permanently embed full-time staff within the offices of state and tribal governments to better meet constituent needs. Further, as the result of his effective advocacy and eight influential congressional testimonies, the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA) became law in October 2018, making pre-disaster mitigation a national priority with the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. The DRRA also provided meaningful changes to the FEMA workforce and bolstered state and local emergency management capabilities.
From 2008-2011, Brock served as Director of Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency (AEMA) under Governor Bob Riley. As Director, he served as the State Coordinating Officer for 14 disasters, including eight presidentially declared events. Brock also served as an on-scene State Incident Commander for the Alabama Unified Command during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Dr. Igor Mezić is Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist at MixMode AI. Mezic works on operator-theoretic methods in nonlinear dynamical systems and control theory and their applications in fluid dynamics, energy efficient design and operations and complex systems dynamics. He did his Dipl. Ing. in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 at the University of Rijeka, Croatia and his Ph. D. in Applied Mechanics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Mezic was a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, UK in 1994-95. From 1995 to 1999 he was a member of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is currently a Professor. In 2000-2001 he worked as an Associate Professor at Harvard University in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He won the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award from NSF and the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award on "Control of Mixing" from IEEE. He also won the United Technologies Senior Vice President award for Science and Technology Special Achievement Prize in 2007. He was an Editor of Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Dr. Mezic is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Fellow of Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Director of the Center for Energy Efficient Design and Head of Buildings and Design Solutions Group at the Institute for Energy Efficiency at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Claire Zulkey is an experienced professional writer based in her home town of Evanston, IL. The author and co-author of numerous books, she began her freelance career in 1998 and since then has had bylines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Entrepreneur and Vice.
