ITRC PNW Transformational Resilience Network

There’s nothing like the giant oil companies to provide us all with lessons about power and prejudice. The climate crisis offers a lens to understand many of the inherent injustices on this planet: There’s an almost perfect inverse relationship between how much of the problem you caused and how much of the pain you’re feeling. Furthermore, it offers the best chance to actually right some of these wrongs: The economic rearrangement that must accompany any successful effort to fix the planet’s...

Like the storm itself, the impact of Hurricane Harvey on Houstonians' mental health promises to linger. Although specific estimates vary widely, the results of numerous research studies suggest residents who suffered a profound personal loss due to the storm are at significantly elevated risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. "A large body of research conducted after disasters in the past decades suggests that the burden of PTSD among persons who were exposed to disasters is significant," a...

After 9/11, I was asked by the Baltimore City Health Commissioner to help prepare the city for a radiation terrorism event, because my entire career up until that point had been in radiation-based medical imaging. I didn’t know anything about public health preparedness at the time, but I found it very fulfilling to work with the city health department and other first responders, especially fire and police. Public health preparedness science and research is more than multi-disciplinary, it’s...