Master's in Emergency & Disaster Management
Vanessa Massaro

I have been teaching at Georgetown since 2020. I'm a geography professor at Bucknell University and I ran the Center for Social Science Research there for 4 years. In that role, I helped design and oversee a methods course for our Social Science students. I have an interdisciplinary PhD in Geography from Penn State University. Prior to that, I completed my MA at the University of Arizona and a BS at Penn State - all in geography! My primary research focus is on the impacts of imprisonment on the economy and communities in the United States. I am currently working on a mixed methods project studying the role of algorithms in criminal justice funding through a Google Inclusion Grant. My research has been published in several peer-reviewed forums including Big Data and Society, ACME, Environment and Planning C and Antipode. One component of my research is methodologies - that is, simply put, researching how to do research.

I have extensive experience in qualitative and mixed methods projects and mentoring graduate and undergraduate student projects that deploy said methods. I am excited to bring my "real world" experience in research design, spatial methods, qualitative and quantitative study to Georgetown.