麻豆传媒

Samantha Penta is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Preparedness in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at SUNY Albany. She earned her Ph.D. and Master of Arts in Sociology and an Honors Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and History with Distinction at the University of Delaware. Previous to her appointment at SUNY Albany, she worked for several years at the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware.

Dr. Penta鈥檚 research focuses on health and medical care in crises, decision-making in preparedness and response, and humanitarian logistics. She worked on projects examining evacuation and preparedness challenges for long-term care facilities, disaster donations behavior, and community recovery and resilience to disasters and epidemics. Her most recent work examines the processes involved in planning and implementing international crisis medical relief efforts, focusing on health and medical responses to the 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Dr. Penta specializes in qualitative research and has participated in multiple quick response field research deployments, including to New York City following Superstorm Sandy, the Oklahoma City area following the May 2013 tornados, Florida leading up to Tropical Storm Erika, Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, and North Carolina following Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

She is committed to interdisciplinary work that both advances scientific knowledge of crises and disasters, while also supporting the people affected by those events. Dr. Penta has presented her work in regional, national, and international forums, including at the Natural Hazards Workshop in Colorado, at the Emergency Management Institute in Emmitsburg, Maryland, at the International Sociological Association鈥檚 World Congress of Sociology in Japan, and at the 4th International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction in New Zealand. Her published work is featured in outlets including the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, Earthquake Spectra, Sociological Forum, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Dr. Amber Silver is currently an Assistant Professor for the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. She received her Ph.D. in Geography and Environmental Management from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her primary research interests focus on how individuals and groups make decisions before, during, and after high-impact weather. More specifically, she is interested in the roles that public attention, risk perception, and communication play in protective action decision making during extreme events. Her most recent research has focused on the ways that new technologies, including social media, influence how individuals obtain, interpret, and respond to official and unofficial warning information.

She has shared the findings of her research in local, national, and international conferences and symposiums, including The World Weather Open Science Conference, the American Meteorological Society鈥檚 annual conference, and the Association of American Geographer鈥檚 conference. Her research has also been published in related journals, including Meteorological Applications, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Amber has recently joined the communications task force of the High Impact Weather (HIWx) working group of the World Weather Research Programme of the World Meteorological Organization. This ten-year project aims to understand and improve the communication of weather information to different end-users in order to promote appropriate protective actions.

Other key areas of interest include the impact of environmental disasters on a sense of place and place attachment; the use of social media as a risk and crisis communications tool; and the role of new media in collective sense-making during and after a disaster.