Rae Zimmerman
Professor of Planning and Public Administration
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, including security and global climate change; the ability of institutions to cope with these stresses; public attitudes toward environmental protection; and social and economic characteristics of communities facing environmental stresses and social justice concerns. 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.
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 the Socioeconomic Planning Sciences, 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, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 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 a member of working groups for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's sustainability commission. She serves on the Editorial Advisor 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 the Committee on the Review and Evaluation of the Army Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 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 Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment of NAS, 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.
