Laurie Johnson

Chief Catastrophe Response and Resiliency Officer

Laurie Johnson, an urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management, served as the Enterprise & Strategic Risk Advisor for CEA from August 2016 until June 2020, when she took on a new leadership position at CEA as Chief Catastrophe Response and Resiliency Officer.​ She has developed CEA’s enterprise risk management program and advises on earthquake response planning and community seismic resilience initiatives.

Laurie holds a Doctor of Informatics degree from Kyoto University and a Master of Urban Planning and Bachelor of Science in Geophysics, both from Texas A&M University.

She began her planning career working with communities that were soon struck by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and has since been involved in post-disaster recovery planning, management and research following many of the world's major urban disasters, including earthquakes in California, Japan, New Zealand, and China. Much of her work is captured in her recent book, After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (2017). Laurie also has an extensive background in disaster loss estimation and catastrophe risk modeling, serving as Vice President of Technical Marketing and Catastrophe Response at RMS for many years.

Laurie is the President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), a technical society devoted to earthquake risk reduction across the U.S. and globally, and is also on the Steering Committee of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance organization (GEER), Board of Trustees of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative (EMI), and Advisory Board of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM). In 2018, she was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners. ​

On windy weekends, you can find Laurie kitefoiling or sailing out on San Francisco Bay or the Sacramento Delta.