NYU Wagner

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) f collaborative and interdisciplinary research, education, and outreach on infrastructure services. She leads ICIS's partnership in the U.S. DHS-funded Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Modeling of Terrorism Events (CREATE) located at the University of Southern California, where her work focuses on critical infrastructure security, and also conducts research supported by New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response. She authored Governmental Management of Chemical Risk (Lewis/CRC), co-produced Beyond September 11th (University of Colorado (Boulder) 2003), and co-edited Digital Infrastructures (Routledge 2004) and Sustaining Urban Networks (Routledge, 2005). She directed Wagner's Urban Planning Program for the fourth time from 2004-2007.

Professor Zimmerman teaches and conducts research that cuts across planning, management and policy in environmental quality, environmental health risk management, and urban infrastructure in the context of the quality of life in cities. Her research areas have included evaluation and decision tools to enable communities to understand and cope with extreme events (both natural and human-induced), social and environmental performance measures for urban infrastructure services, institutional aspects of global climate change, attitudes of farmers toward the environmental protection, and social and economic characteristics of communities with hazardous waste sites. 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, USC, and Dartmouth College, and various state and local agencies.

Her publications have appeared in numerous edited books as well as in planning, environmental and public administration journals including the Journal of Urban Health; Risk Analysis; 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, co-chairing the First World Congress on Risk in 2003. 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.