The heart of NYU Wagner's programs is our faculty. An amalgam of full-time, clinical/research/visiting, and adjunct professors, they are outstanding teachers, expert researchers and committed practitioners.
The heart of NYU Wagner's programs is our faculty. An amalgam of full-time, clinical/research/visiting, and adjunct professors, they are outstanding teachers, expert researchers and committed practitioners.
The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service is home to research and policy centers, institutes, and initiatives that focus on solving urban problems and strengthening public policy and public service nationally and around the world.
Ranked #10 in Public Affairs by U.S. News & World Report, the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service educates the future leaders of public, nonprofit, healthcare and private sector organizations addressing the world's critical issues.
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Rae Zimmerman is Professor of Planning and Public Administration at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and since 1998, Director of the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS), a center, initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for collaborative and interdisciplinary research, education, and outreach on infrastructure services. She directed Wagner's Urban Planning Program for the fourth time from 2004-2007.
Her teaching and research encompasses environmental quality, environmental health risk management, and urban infrastructure in the context of the quality of life in cities. Some specific areas of focus of her research include social and environmental performance measures for the resiliency of urban infrastructure services in the face of extreme events of both natural and human origins. Her work on this topic covers security and global climate change; the ability of institutions to cope with these stresses; public attitudes toward environmental protection; social and economic characteristics of communities facing environmental stresses; and social justice. Her research also has addressed risk communication in the context of unanticipated events. She has developed and teaches courses in areas that encompass this research, for example, on how cities adapt to innovations in energy, transportation and water; environmental impact assessment; and environmental planning, and she is developing a course on emergency planning. Professor Zimmerman has directed research projects with funding most recently from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through three universities-NYU, the University of Southern California, and Dartmouth College, and various state and local agencies. Professor Zimmerman works closely with NYU-Poly on research connected with cyber threats to physical infrastructures.
She authored Governmental Management of Chemical Risk (Lewis/CRC), co-produced Beyond September 11th (University of Colorado at Boulder 2003), and co-edited Digital Infrastructures (Routledge 2004) and Sustaining Urban Networks (Routledge 2005). Additionally, her publications have appeared in numerous edited books as well as in planning, environmental and public administration journals including, for example, the Socioeconomic Planning Sciences, Energy Policy, the Journal of Urban Health, Risk Analysis, the Journal of Applied Security Research, the International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, Water Resources Research, the Journal of Urban Technology, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Disaster Management, Fordham Urban Law Journal, and the Policy Studies Journal. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and past president and Fellow of the international Society for Risk Analysis. She is currently a member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board Homeland Security Advisory Committee and the New York City Panel on Climate Change. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Risk Analysis; the Journal of Risk Research; the Journal of Urban Technology; and the International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, and is a reviewer for over a dozen other journals. Former professional appointments and memberships include working groups for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's sustainability commission, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on the Review and Evaluation of the Army Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program, the U.S. EPA Board of Scientific Counselors (charter member from 1996 - 2003), the U.S. EPA National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) Working Group on Drinking Water Research, the NAS Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Comparative Risk Committee. She holds a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of California (Berkeley), a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in planning from Columbia University.
rae.zimmerman@nyu.edu
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