Our Featured Fellow for March 2024 is Nick Humphrey, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Disaster Resilience, and Emergency Management at North Dakota State University.

Nick joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in Fall 2022. He participated in the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies-Bill Anderson Fund Partnership Kickoff Meeting at the 2023 Natural Hazards and Applications Workshop. This event helped Fellows explore cross-learning opportunities between researchers and representatives from non-profit and community-based organizations serving disaster-affected communities across the American Midwest.

Nick is a past recipient of the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth’s Mancur Olson Graduate Fellowship. He is also an active member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), a voting member on the AMS Board on Societal Impacts, and a co-chair for the Seventh Conference on Weather Warnings and Communication to be held in June 2024 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Nick holds an M.S. in Geosciences with a concentration in Applied Meteorology from Mississippi State University. His interests have always been on the nexus between meteorology and social science—specifically, the impact of weather and climate phenomena on people and the built environment. Nick interned for the US National Weather Service (NWS) office in Grand Forks, North Dakota during the spring 2023 semester. He worked on projects for the office related to social vulnerability. This included the identification of vulnerable populations and underserved communities/partners and providing guidance on identifying such populations, with the goal to improve weather communication and warnings. He also helped inform an initial list of vulnerable populations/underserved partners submitted to the NWS regional office as part of an initiative to identify such groups within NWS county warning areas.

Nick’s research interests revolve around individual and household response to warnings, protective action models, and understanding warning communicators. His dissertation is a qualitative study which explores US NWS meteorologists’ knowledge of human behavior during tornado warnings and how that knowledge informs their warning communication approach. Nick hopes his research helps the emergency management community better understand what meteorologists consider to be the most important factors influencing individual warning response. He also hopes to foster further discussion and reflection on the role of meteorologists in emergency management. Nick plans on defending his dissertation in summer 2024.

When he is not working on his dissertation, Nick enjoys spending time with family, watching TV, and tracking the weather across the country and the world. He works as a graduate writing consultant for the North Dakota State University Center for Writers. Nick also occasionally conducts interviews for independent, alternative media programs interested in topics related to emergency management, climate change, and extreme weather events.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: Warnings, individual/household response, protective action models, risk communication, social vulnerability.