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Dr. Susan Cutter is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute. Her primary research interests are in the area of disaster vulnerability/resilience science and how vulnerability and resilience are measured, monitored, and assessed. She has authored or edited fourteen books, the most recent published by Cambridge University Press, Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi, more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Dr. Cutter has mentored more than 50 masters and doctoral students.

Dr. Cutter has led field teams to study long term recovery from Hurricane Katrina (2005), Hurricane Sandy (2012), the October 2015 South Carolina floods, and Hurricane Matthew (2016). She has provided expert testimony to Congress on hazards and vulnerability, was a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers IPET team evaluating the social impacts of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Protection System in response to Hurricane Katrina, and was a juror for the Rebuild by Design competition for Hurricane Sandy reconstruction. Her policy-relevant work focuses on emergency management and disaster recovery at local, state, national, and international levels, with funding from NSF, the US Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, NASA, USGS, FEMA, DHS, South Carolina’s Emergency Management Division (EMD) and State Law Enforcement Division (SLED), and Florida’s Department of Health. 

Dr. Cutter serves on many national advisory boards and committees including those of National Research Council (NRC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She chaired the US National Academies committee that authored the 2012 seminal report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. She is a member of the Research Advisory Group for UK DFID, and served as Vice-Chair of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) Science Committee, an international advisory board sponsored by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). Dr. Cutter serves as co-executive editor of Environment, associate editor of Weather, Climate, and Society, member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Extreme Events and is an editorial board member for Natural Hazards, Annals of the AAG, and International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. She is also serving as the Editor-in-Chief for the Oxford Research Encyclopedias Natural Hazard Science.

She received her B.A. from California State University, East Bay and her M.A. and Ph.D. (1976) from the University of Chicago.