Liesel Ritchie

Dr. Liesel Ritchie is a Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. During her career, Ritchie has studied a range of disaster events, including the Exxon Valdez, BP Deepwater Horizon, and Wakashio oil spills; the Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash release; Hurricane Katrina; and earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand.

Since 2000, her focus has been on community resilience and the social impacts of disasters, including conducting social impact assessments, with an emphasis on technological hazards and disasters, social capital, and rural renewable resource communities, and she has published widely on these topics.

Ritchie has more than 30 years of experience in research and evaluation. Prior to joining VT, she served as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Disasters and Extreme Events at Oklahoma State University (2018-2020) and as Associate Director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (2007-2018). Ritchie was a Senior Research Associate at the Evaluation Center (Western Michigan University) and served for six years as Coordinator for the Social Science Research Center's Evaluation & Decision Support Laboratory (Mississippi State University).

Ritchie has been PI or co-PI on more than 100 projects and authored or coauthored nearly 100 technical reports working with agencies and organizations including NASA, NIST, NSF, USGS, FEMA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Feeding America, NOAA, and U.S. Department of the Interior. She currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow with Northeastern University's Global Resilience Institute.

Ritchie has also served as a National Institute of Standards and Technology Disaster Resilience Fellow, a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee for Measuring Community Resilience, and as an Advisory Board member for the National Academies Gulf Research Program and LabX.