Louis Comfort is a Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches in the field of public policy analysis, information policy, organizational theory, and sociotechnical systems. She holds degrees in political science from Macalester College (B.A.); University of California, Berkeley (M.A.), and Yale University (Ph.D.). She is Principal Investigator, Interactive, Intelligent, Spatial Information System (IISIS) Project, 1994-present: http://www.iisis.pitt.edu. Recent publications related to disaster management include: "Crisis Management in Hindsight: Cognition, Communication, Coordination, and Control." 2007. Public Administration Review. Special Issue, Administrative Failure in the Wake of Katrina. December. Pp. S188-S196. "Communication, Coherence, and Collective Action: The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Infrastructure." 2006. Public Works Management and Policy. Vol. 11, No. 1, 1-16; and "Risk, Security and Disaster Management." 2005. Annual Review of Political Science. Vol. 8: 335-356. June. Dr. Comfort is currently engaged in four large-scale research projects on crisis management. She is concluding in August, 2009 a five-year National Science Foundation-funded research project on Secure CITI: A Critical Information Technology Infrastructure in which she served as a co-principal investigator with two computer scientists. The project examined the design of networks of information infrastructure for urban regions. Dr. Comfort is currently the principal investigator on a three-year NSF-funded project on Designing Resilience for Communities at Risk: Improving Decision Making to Support Collective Action under Stress. This project focuses on the design and development of a computational model for an early tsunami detection system for a testbed off the coast of Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia. Further, she is engaged in the development of a testbed for information systems to be implemented with the collaboration of practicing agencies in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Region, Pennsylvania. She is also a Project Lead Investigator on a research arm to develop an electronic dashboard for a large research project, Public Health Adaptive Systems, that is examining the adaptive capacity of the public health system. This project, conducted jointly with three other research arms, is directed by Margaret Potter, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh and funded by the Centers for Disease Control. In her research, Dr. Comfort has focused on the design, development, and integration of information processes to support decision making in urgent, uncertain environments.