Susan L. Cutter

Biosketch

Susan L. Cutter, PhD is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina and co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability & Resilience Institute (HVRI). She earned her BA in Geography from California State University East Bay and her PhD in Geography from the University of Chicago. She previously held academic appointments at the University of Washington and Rutgers University before relocating to the University of South Carolina in 1993. She is fellow of the AAAS and the American Association of Geographers (AAG), a foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and NAS. She has been president of the AAG and the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). Awards include Lifetime Achievement, Presidential Achievement, and the Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research (AAG), Charles E. Fritz Award (RC39 of the International Sociological Association), and an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

Research Interests

Dr. Cutter's research centers on human-environment interactions and how they produce risks, hazards, and disasters, and how they influence the geographic impacts on people and where they live. The research specifically examines the geospatial dimensions of vulnerability science—what makes people and the places susceptible to hazards and resilience science-what factors influence the capacity of communities in various places to adequately prepare for, respond to, cope with, recover from and adapt to such threats. Taking a geospatial perspective and analytical approach facilitates comparisons between places, among different segments of society, with applications to a wide range of threat sources ranging from natural hazards to climate change, to toxic materials releases, terrorism, and pandemics. Translating vulnerability and resilience science research into useful and useable knowledge for practitioners is part of her longstanding research agenda.