As wildfires grow more frequent and devastating, they expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, governance, and community preparedness. Tackling this escalating threat demands interdisciplinary solutions that address not just the immediate risks but also the broader systemic changes driving extreme weather events.
This Matrix on Point discussion will feature Christopher Ansell, Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM); Kenichi Soga, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure; and Marta Gonzalez, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning. Louise Comfort, Professor Emerita and Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will moderate.
This panel is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, and presented as part of Matrix On Point, a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
Panelists
Christopher Ansell received his B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia in 1979 and worked at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment from 1979 through 1984. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1993. His fields of interest include public policy, public administration, governance, and organization theory, with a geographical focus on Europe. His current research focuses on collaborative modes of governance with a focus on collective problem-solving, democracy and sustainability. He also studies the politics and management of risk and has an ongoing interest in public health, environmental policy and crisis management. His work is inspired by the philosophy of Pragmatism.
Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Soga is also the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves as a Special Advisor to the Dean of the College of Engineering for Resilient and Sustainable Systems. Soga’s research focuses on infrastructure sensing and modeling, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan. He is the PI of the NSF-funded Smart and Connected Communities project “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities: Modeling Risk Across Scales of Time and Space”.
Marta Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gonzalez’s research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies. She is the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016.
Louise K. Comfort is Project Scientist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and co-principal investigator for the National Science Foundation grant titled “Designing Smart, Sustainable Risk Reduction in Hazard-Prone Communities,” 2022-2025, at UC Berkeley. She is professor Emerita, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and was the Director of the Center for Disaster Management at the University of Pittsburgh from 2009-2017. A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration since 2006, she received the 2020 Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement, Section on International Comparative Administration, for the American Society of Public Administration. Her recent books include The Dynamics of Risk Changing Technologies and Collective Action in Seismic Events, Princeton University Press, 2019; Global Risk Management: The Role of Collective Cognition in Response to COVID-19, Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Mary Lee Rhodes’ and Hazardous Seas: A Sociotechnical Framework for Early Tsunami Detection and Warning, Island Press, 2023, co-edited with H.P. Rahayu. She studies the dynamics of decision making in response to urgent events: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfire, and COVID-19.
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