Monique Lewis
Monique is a disaster management and humanitarian assistance subject matter expert with diverse skills spanning from emergency preparedness and mitigation to training and education, project management, engineering, program implementation, and planning.
She led international teams to write the AAR for the U.S. response to the Nepal Earthquake in 2014 and provided recommendations to a $500 million World Bank development project in Bangladesh. She has extensive experience conducting strategic assessments and translating leadership vision into actionable goals.
Monique has successfully facilitated and coordinated teams at the international level and at the interagency, whole-of-community level within the U.S., which has developed successful deliverables and program outcomes. She has focused her entire career on disaster risk reduction and strategy development through capacity building and resilience. She spent two years at the Pentagon leading emergency management and writing policy for the U.S. Air Force. She also served as a member mitigating climate change at U.S. military installations worldwide. Internationally, she was the Assessment Lead in Mongolia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, working at the Embassy and Ministry levels to assist Partner Nations in developing their emergency management agencies by identifying their areas of improvement, strengths, disaster risk reduction strategy, and capability gaps.
Additionally, she led business processes, coordinated technical knowledge, and facilitated bilateral and multilateral engagements at the strategic level in the Republic of Georgia, Germany, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, and Guam. She also served as the Team Lead for developing regionalized disaster management and peacekeeping curricula at two peacekeeping training centers in East and West Africa.
Monique was the Lead Writer for the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) 2020 Doctrine revision for the FEMA National Exercise Division. She was also on a three-person team developing the United States’ first-ever Cybersecurity Grant via the Invest in America Act, where a $1-billion-dollar grant program was developed for State, Local, and Tribal governments to apply to increase their cybersecurity capacity and capability.
She also worked on the National Level Exercise 2022 and 2024, supporting FEMA in its exercise design and development.
Currently, she is supporting the CDCReady Responder program, working on strategic communication, policy, and program implementation.
In 2024, she finished her Doctorate at Georgetown University, focusing on the national security impacts of climate change as a root cause analysis and case study of environmental exacerbation impacting upon terrorism and national risk.
She also serves as a Reviewer for the esteemed peer-reviewed academic Journal of Emergency Management and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.