Clarence Wardell, III, Ph.D.

Since 2009, Clarence Wardell III, Ph.D. has been a researcher in CNA’s Safety and Security Division. During his tenure at CNA, Wardell has provided analytical support to emergency management organizations at the local, state, and federal levels of government to improve emergency preparedness. In particular, Wardell has applied qualitative and quantitative analytical methods to support FEMA’s National Preparedness Assessment Division (NPAD) in the development of assessment reporting products and policy recommendations. He is part of the core team responsible for developing the annual National Preparedness Report (NPR), a key requirement of Presidential Policy Directive 8: National Preparedness. In addition to NPR related work, he also authored the 2011 National Level Exercise Resource Allocation Workshop After Action Report, led a review for FEMA of its Temporary Housing Unit inventory policy in 2011, and worked with local governments to assess their preparedness capabilities.

Since 2010, Wardell has led CNA’s research efforts related to the adoption and use of new media technologies by emergency management organizations. This has included work with the National Emergency Management Association, Crisis Commons, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, American Red Cross, and colleagues at the University of Arkansas. As part of this work, he was co-author of the report 2011 Social Media + Emergency Management Camp: Transforming the Response Enterprise, as well as developer of a national survey of emergency management agency social media capabilities. In 2012, CNA recognized his innovative work in the area of social media in emergency management, presenting him with the Safety and Security Innovation Award.

Prior to joining CNA, Wardell completed his Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His dissertation, titled, “Signaling and Search in Humanitarian Giving: Models of Donor and Organization Behavior in the Humanitarian Space”, modeled the competitive behavior of humanitarian relief organizations in disaster response settings. While at Georgia Tech, he spent a summer at IBM Research developing revenue management algorithms. Wardell, who is a board member of the Jitegemee program for street children in Machakos, Kenya, also continues to conduct research related to understanding individual charitable giving behavior in online environments.

Originally from Lathrup Village, MI, he graduated from the University of Michigan in 2004 with a degree in computer engineering.