Claire B. Rubin has more than 40 years of experience in the field of emergency management, having worked as an independent researcher, academic, practitioner, and consultant. As a consultant, she has worked for many organizations - private, non-profit and government. Her work includes basic and applied research; the development and presentation of training programs; and the creation and operation of various information dissemination and utilization projects. From 1998-2014, Ms. Rubin was affiliated with the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.; she was a research associate and adjunct faculty member there. For the past nine years, she has maintained the blog RecoveryDiva.com. She has published about 100 articles and given many lectures at professional conferences. Rubin is the co-founder and former Managing Editor of The Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which is now in its 14th year of publication.

Susan L. Cutter is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina and director of the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute. She is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar publishing more than 14 books and 175 refereed articles and book chapters. Her primary research interests are in the area of vulnerability and resilience science and how they influence place-based differences in disaster recovery. Cutter is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a former president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). She served on many national advisory boards and committees, including those of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and was a juror for the Rebuild by Design competition for Hurricane Sandy Recovery Projects. She also is an elected a foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters. She received her master's and doctorate in geography from the University of Chicago.