September 2003 marked the beginning of a new undergraduate

Emergency and Environmental Management concentration within the

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Course offerings include

Sociology of Risk, Disasters and Society, Environmental Sociology,

Collective Behavior, and Crowds, Cults & Revolutions, as well as a

practicum and seminar in Emergency and Environmental Management.

Graduate-level courses in Collective Behavior and Disasters continue to

be offered in the department. More information can be found on the

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice homepage,

http://www.udel.edu.edu/soc

DRC is pleased to welcome Professor Havidán Rodríguez as its new

director and as a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal

Justice, with whom the DRC is affiliated. Dr. Rodríguez comes to the

University of Delaware form the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez,

where he held joint appointments as Professor in the Department of

Social Sciences and Researcher (and former Director) of the Center for

Applied Social Research (CISA). In addition to having extensive in

conducting research on hazards and disasters, Dr. Rodríguez also

specializes in demography and social research methods. He received his

Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr.

Rodríguez has held associate and interim dean positions at the

University of Puerto Rico, and he also served as the Director of the

Minority Affairs Program of American Sociological Association, from

1995 to 1998.

Havidán Rodríguez gave a number of presentations this semester. On

April 24, 2004, he was keynote speaker at the 5th Annual Conference

Undergraduate Research and Expression: A Celebration of Excellence,

Reading Area Community College, Reading, Pennsylvania. His talk was

titled "Preparing the New Generations of Scholars, Researchers, and

Professionals: Benefits, Opportunities, and Contributions of Research

Training." He presented "Enhancing Undergraduate Research Training: A

Focus on Hazards and Disasters" at the NDMS Disaster Response

Conference: Catastrophic Care for the Nation, April 21-25, 2004, Dallas,

Texas and "A 'Long Walk to Freedom' and Democracy: Human Rights,

Globalization, and Social Injustice" in the Panel on Human Rights and

Globalization, Southern Sociological Society 2004 Annual Conference,

April 14-17, 2004, Atlanta, Georgia.

Havidán Rodríguez was recently awarded a grant funded by the Sea

Grant College Program at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. This

research project, "Population Composition, Geographic Distribution, and

Natural Hazards: Vulnerability in the Coastal Regions of Puerto Rico," is

a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort between DRC, the Center for

Applied Social Research and the Physical Oceanography Laboratory in

the Department of Marine Sciences, both at the University of Puerto

Rico-Mayagüez.

Joanne Nigg, a member of the Division Review Committee for the Energy

and Environmental Sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory,

participated in a program review meeting on May 2-5, 2004.

Joseph Trainor co-authored a paper with former DRC director Kathleen

Tierney titled "Networks and Resilience in the World Trade Center

Disaster." The paper will be included in the Research Accomplishments

Volume for the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering

Research. Joseph also gave an invited presentation titled "Social

Organization of Emergent Multi-Organizational Disaster Response

Networks" to an undergraduate Sociology of Disasters class at

Millersville University, Millersville, PA

During the Summer and Fall, 2004, DRC faculty Havidán Rodríguez and

Joanne Nigg will be working with two undergraduates who have been

awared the Social Science Scholars award. Jennifer Barron will be

studying environmental problems and concerns resulting from the World

Trade Center disaster in New York City. Carla Russell will be conducting

a comparative study on Hurricane Andrew in Florida and Hurricane Mitch

in Honduras, focusing on the differential impacts of these hurricanes in

both regions and the role that development plays in this process.

Tricia Wachtendorf has two recent co-authored presentations with her

colleague, James Kendra. Tricia presented their work "Integrating

Improvisation in Disaster Response Planning" as an invited presenter at

the European Crisis Management Academy International Conference in

Poljce, Slovenia in March 2004. Her colleague gave an invited

presentation titled "Creativity and Coordination in Disaster Response" at

the 4th Workshop for Comparative Study on Urban Earthquake Disaster

Management in Kobe, Japan in January, 2004.  

In January, 2004, Joseph Trainer presented a poster and also

co-authored a presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Multidisciplinary

Center for Earthquake Engineering Research in Los Angeles, CA. These

were based on work he has been conducting with former DRC director

Kathleen Tierney (now at the University of Colorado - Boulder) and Tricia

Wachtendorf on DRC's World Trade Center project. The poster and

presentation were titled Multi-Organizational Networks and Community

Resilience in Extreme Events: A Case Study of the September 11th

World Trade Center Attacks.

Tricia Wachtendorf and former DRC researcher James Kendra (now at

University of North Texas) have had their most recent article

"Reconsidering Convergence and Converger Legitimacy in Response to

the World Trade Center Disaster" published in Terrorism and Disaster:

New Threats, New Ideas, Special Issue of Research in Social Problems

and Public Policy, 11, 97-122, 2003.

In September, 2003, Professor Benigno Aguirre presented his paper

Desastres en Latinoamerica: Vulnerabilidad yResistencia" at the 6th

Conference of the European Sociological Association in Murcia, Spain.