Who We Are

Heather Bedle received a B.S. (1999) in physics from Wake Forest University and then worked as a systems and electrical engineer in the defense industry for Raytheon and Northrup Grumman. She later received an M.S. (2005) and a Ph.D. (2008) in geophysics from Northwestern University. After nine years of working with Chevron, she moved to academia to pursue her dream of teaching and mentoring young researchers, starting at the University of Houston in 2016. In 2018, she moved to the University of Oklahoma where, in addition to active NSF and PRF grants, she is PI of the AASPI Consortium. In the last three years, her diverse research group has published over 30 peer-reviewed manuscripts and presented over 40 conference presentations.  Dr. Bedle’s primary research interests lie in the intersection of earth, energy, and the environment and her methods revolve around data science and machine learning, using a variety of data from reflection seismic, earthquake, shallow crustal geophysical methods, and social survey data.

Edward Cokely serves as Presidential Research Professor and Professor of Psychology at the University of Oklahoma, and is co-founding faculty of the National Institute for Risk & Resilience. Dr. Cokely is recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Psychology of Skilled Decision Making. He has published 75+ papers on Decision Psychology and Cognitive Engineering, securing millions in continuous grant funding for research, outreach, and student support (e.g., NSF, NAS, Tempelton, MedScape). He has received 19 research and teaching honors including premier awards for “major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior” and for “improving our understanding of the needs and processes of diverse decision makers in more than 50 countries” (e.g., FABBS 2017 Early Career Impact Award; NSF 2013 early CAREER award). His research has also been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, and New York Times and Wall Street Journal Online, among others. His primary research specializations include:

- Risk Literacy and Science for Informed Decision Making

- Decision Vulnerability and Human Factors Engineering

- Risk Communication, Data Visualization, and Adaptive Decision Support

- Expert Performance, Skill Acquisition, and Training Technologies

- Decision Analytics, Data Science, and User Experience (UX)

Andrés D. González is an Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Rice University, and in Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). He also holds a Six-Sigma Black Belt from Arizona State University, an M.Eng. in Industrial Engineering and a B.Sc. in Physics from Universidad de los Andes. His research focuses on developing and applying analytical tools from systems dynamics, statistical physics, operations research, and civil engineering to study the dynamics associated with social and physical systems. He has worked on modeling the behavior of financial markets, the spread of infectious diseases, designing routes and frequencies of massive transportation systems, and more recently on optimizing the resilience of critical interdependent infrastructure networks and supply chains.

Charles Kenney is a Professor at University of Oklahoma, where he has taught Government and Politics of Latin America and the International Relations of Latin America since 1997. Dr. Kenney lived in Peru from 1978-79 and 1984-1991, received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 1998, was a Fulbright Fellow at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in 2000, and is the past chair of the Peru Section of the Latin American Studies Association. He was a member of the Latin American Studies Association delegation of international electoral observers for the 2000 Peruvian elections and the National Democratic Institute and Carter Center joint international observation mission in 2001.

He has published Fujimori's Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press 2004), articles in Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, PostData, Elecciones, Estudios de Filosofía, Areté, Páginas, and chapters in books edited by Oxford University Press and the Frederich Ebert Foundation. His primary areas of interest include democratization, constitutional design, electoral and party systems, and Peruvian politics.

Aikaterini (Katerina) Kyprioti received her Bachelor degree (2014) in Civil Engineering with a minor on civil infrastructure, and her Master’s (2016) in Earthquake Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She then moved to the States, and graduated in 2022 with a PhD in Civil Engineering and a Master’s in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, leading her Natural Hazards Infrastructure Resilience Lab. She is the winner of the EMI student paper competition in both the Dynamics committee (2021) and the Probabilistic Methods committee (2020) and of the IASSAR Student Paper competition (2022) for her research projects.  Her work focuses on integrating and adapting computational statistics in civil engineering applications with a particular interest on natural hazard risk mitigation and infrastructure resiliency. She has worked with numerous key agencies (NOAA, FEMA, and USACE) on storm surge coastal hazard estimation, for both real-time forecasting and regional planning, using surrogate modeling to expedite the surge estimation.

Erin Maher is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Senior Associate Director of OU’s Data Institute for Societal Challenges. Her research focuses on the intersection of poverty and child maltreatment, child well-being, and family functioning. She works with state agencies to evaluate social programs in these areas. She brings an applied focus to her scholarship and an emphasis on using and communicating research results in policy and practice. Dr. Mahr is currently Principal Investigator of the Oklahoma Parent Child Assistance Project, a randomized control trial of an intensive case management and home-visiting program for mothers with problematic substance use during pregnancy. Prior to coming to OU, she served as Director of Research for a large national foundation conducting large-scale program evaluations in child welfare. She has published extensively in journals reflecting a variety of academic disciplines with a practice focus.

Kristin Olofsson is a professor of environmental policy and natural resource governance. Her work centers around equitable representation in resource conflicts and uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches, all with a focus on community engagement and co-production of knowledge and solutions.

Justin Reedy is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and research associate in the Institute for Public Policy Research & Analysis (formerly the Center for Risk & Crisis Management) at the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Reedy studies political communication and deliberation, mass and digital media, and group communication. In particular, his research focuses on how individuals and groups of people make decisions on contentious issues in face-to-face and online settings, how people and policy makers can come together to deliberate and make better decisions on issues that involve significant societal and personal risk, and how communication research can address racial and ethnic inequalities in our society. Some recent and ongoing projects involve helping communities deliberate on and develop solutions to environmental problems, working with American Indian / Alaska Native communities to address health and biomedical research inequities through community engaged research, studying how underserved and minority communities can be better reached with risk communication messages, and analyzing how news media content may contribute to marginalization of minority groups and immigrants.

Dr. Reedy earned a B.S. degree from Georgia Tech in 2000, and earned a master’s degree (2008) and then a Ph.D. (2013) in communication, with a certificate in political communication, at the University of Washington. Prior to graduate school, he was a media professional, working as a reporter and columnist at daily newspapers in the Atlanta area, and then as a media relations specialist and science writer for the UW Medicine system of the University of Washington.

Arif Sadri is an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil Engineering & Environmental Sciences (CEES) at the University of Oklahoma. Previously, he held faculty positions at the Florida International University, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and the Valparaiso University. Dr. Sadri received his doctoral training from the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University with a solid background in Civil Engineering (Transportation), Data Science, Network Science, and Social Science. Dr. Sadri's research focuses on how transportation systems critically depend on social and other physical systems in the context of natural and man-made hazards. Dr. Sadri develops data-driven and network-based solutions to enhance bottom-up resilience in complex, interdependent systems. Dr. Sadri specializes in resilience engineering, evacuation modeling, shared mobility, social influence modeling, machine learning, agent-based modeling, and network modeling. Dr. Sadri's research has been funded by National Science Foundation, United States Department of Transportation, Oklahoma Department of Transportation, Florida Department of Transportation, and United States Agency for International Development.

Harold Brooks majored in physics and math at William Jewell for his BA, with a year of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge. His graduate degrees are in atmospheric sciences (MS-Columbia, PhD-Illinois). He's been at NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory since 1990 and works on the distribution, forecasting, and impacts of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes and the evaluation of weather forecasts. He teaches a graduate course on Forecast Evaluation and Decision Analysis in the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology, where he is an Affiliate Professor. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications.

Jason Furtado is an Associate Professor in the School of Meteorology and Carlisle and Lurline Mabrey Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He holds a Ph.D. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from The Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on large-scale climate dynamics, the dynamics of coupled systems (e.g., stratosphere-troposphere, ocean-atmosphere) across multiple timescales, subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting, predictions of extreme weather, and climate change. Prior to OU, Dr. Furtado was a climate scientist and sub-seasonal weather forecaster for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a private-sector company in the Boston area. He has contributed to numerous media stories about weather and climate and his own research to outlets such as The Washington Post, CNN, and ABC News. Outside of work, Jason enjoys traveling, playing trivia, and volunteering with schools nationwide to encourage education and participation in STEM.

Heyjie Jung is an organizational behavior scholar in the field of public administration and policy interested in investigating organizational, social, and institutional factors that shape and guide individual's perceptions and behaviors in public organizations. In particular, she is interested in the topics of diversity and inclusion, leadership, social networks, and Science and Technology Policies. 

She investigates social network structures and compositions at workplaces to understand their impacts on workplace outcomes such as perception of inclusion, productivity, work-life-balance, and leadership motivation. Further on, she studies the diverse context of organizations by investigating individual-level as well as organizational-level culture. She is interested in the impacts of technology adoption such as Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence and the impacts of technology-led challenges on employees’ behavior, perceptions, social networks, and intergroup relationships as well as decision making in public organizations.

Georgia Kosmopoulou is a Professor of Economics. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and taught at Virginia Tech for a year before joining OU. She also served as a Program Director in Economics at the National Science Foundation recently and is currently the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences and serves as an Intermittent Expert at NSF. 

Her areas of specialization are in Industrial Organization, Public Policy Analysis and Game Theory. Her current research interests are in auctions, network analysis, supply side uncertainty and network vulnerabilities, strategic pricing, firm behavior, and market survival. Applications of her work can be found in analysis of government procurement auctions, contract renegotiations in road construction, NFTs, strategic network formation and firm dynamics in airline industries, and “cap-and-trade” mechanisms for CO2 emission permits.

Michael Long is the author/co-author of six books and over 90 journal articles and book chapters primarily in the areas of environmental sociology, green criminology, sustainability, food insecurity, public health, and quantitative methodology. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, the British Academy, among others for his research. Michael is currently the co-editor of The Sociological Quarterly. He is the lead co-editor for the forthcoming Handbook on Inequality and the Environment (2023, Edward Elgar).

The work conducted by Dr. Martin and her group of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars aims to further our knowledge of climate, climate variability, and weather-climate interactions through research, education, and inclusion, with a focus on precipitation. Accomplishments have ranged from research grants and publications from multiple agencies, including an NSF CAREER award to improve our understanding of future changes in wet and dry periods across the globe, the seasonal timing of rainfall, controls on tropical rainfall, Oklahoma winter precipitation, and more. In parallel with these efforts her group works with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and stakeholders to ensure that the science and education materials produced are useable and actionable all while working on DEI efforts across the School, College, and University.

Angela Person is an architecture professor at the University of Oklahoma. Trained as a geographer, her work explores the intersections of design, community identity, heritage, and sustainability. She has edited or co-authored three scholarly books that explore the legacy of Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture, affect and heritage environments, and cultural institution facility management. Her research has also appeared in academic journals including the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Journal of Architectural Education, and Enquiry: The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research. This work has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Graham Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and other organizations.

Scott Robinson’s research and teaching focuses on the management of public service organizations as they cope with various forms of disasters or extreme events. He teaches classes on grant writing and project management for charities and disaster politics – as well as more general courses on managing public service organizations. His research has focused on disaster planning and response. In particular, he has recently completed a National Science Foundation research project on the managing mass evacuations and integrating charities into evacuation support. His current projects include better models for vulnerability to tornadoes and public trust in government organizations – especially those that seek to provide advice on public safety issues.

Aaron Wendelboe is a nationally recognized epidemiologist and public health leader. He is an alumnus of the renowned Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From March to July of 2020, he was deployed to the Oklahoma State Department of Health where he served as the Interim State Epidemiologist, coordinating epidemiology elements of the State’s response to Covid-19. Dr. Wendelboe continues to pursue his passion of bridging academic and applied public health. He serves on the University of Oklahoma Medical Center’s Infection Control and Prevention Committee and the OUHSC’s Emergency Response Committee. In these roles, he collaborates with national, Tribal, and local stakeholders in preparing for and responding to pandemics (e.g., 2009 influenza H1N1, Ebola virus, Zika virus, and COVID-19).