LAURIE A JOHNSON PHD

​Laurie A. Johnson, Principal and Founder

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Laurie Johnson is an internationally-recognized urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management. For over 30 years, she has combined her unique blend of professional practice and research to help communities address the complex urban challenges posed by natural hazards and disasters. Much of her post-disaster recovery efforts are captured in her recent book, After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (2017).  She is also the coauthor of Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (2010) which examines the post-disaster recovery policies, plans and planning processes in the City of New Orleans in the first three years following Hurricane Katrina.

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She founded her consultancy in 2006 and its clients have included cities, counties, state and national emergency management agencies, university and research institutions, philanthropic and non-profit organizations, and private insurers. She was formerly a Vice-President with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), working with global property and casualty insurers to manage their exposure to natural catastrophe risk, and a consulting planner with EQE International (now ABS Consulting) and Spangle Associates.

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In 2020, Laurie assumed the position of Chief Catastrophe Response and Resiliency Officer with the California Earthquake Authority where she is responsible for organizational readiness and response and claim handling following earthquakes across the state. She is also responsible for the development and implementation of claims administration for the newly-formed California Wildfire Fund--a wildfire liability risk pool for the state's three largest private utilities. Laurie is the immediate Past-President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI)—a multi-disciplinary technical society with over 3,000 members devoted to earthquake risk reduction worldwide, and she is also affiliated faculty with New York University’s Global Institute for Public Health Program on Population Impact, Recovery and Resilience.  She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative and the Advisory Board of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM), and the past chair of the federal advisory committee for the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.  She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP) in 2018 and is a long-standing member of both the American Planning Association and EERI.

 

She completed her Doctor of Informatics degree at Kyoto University, Japan in 2009. Her dissertation focused on developing a management framework for empowering communities in disaster recovery. She is also a graduate of Texas A&M University, where she received both a Master of Urban Planning and a Bachelor of Science in Geophysics.

 

​Collaboration and Teaming​

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Laurie Johnson Consulting | Research prides itself upon its many successful collaborations, building and leading and also participating on specially-designed, multidisciplinary teams for both public and private sector consulting projects and research. Team members have included both leading practitioners and academic experts in civil, structural and earthquake engineering, geoscience and geotechnical engineering, meteorology, land use and urban redevelopment, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, public administration and policy, emergency management, and social science.

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