Online Master's in Emergency & Disaster Management
Jeffrey Stern

Dr. Jeffrey Stern is a lecturer in the Georgetown EDM program, where he developed and taught the curriculum for the WMD/Terrorism module and has provided counseling to graduate students completing capstone theses. In 2014, Dr. Stern was appointed by Governor Terry McAuliffe as State Coordinator at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the Commonwealth’s all-hazards disaster preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery agency, where he has led a comprehensive agency-wide reorganization to build a ready and resilient Virginia in the face of today’s risk environment, based upon strategic and sustainable programs, professional development opportunities, enhanced regional capabilities, and a quick and integrated response to disasters. In this role, he also chairs the Virginia 9-1-1 Board and is the State Administrative Agent for all federal homeland security and emergency management grant programs in Virginia. He has previously served in local and federal government, the private sector, and academia. A former firefighter/paramedic, battalion chief, special operations team leader for technical/urban search and rescue, hazmat, swiftwater rescue, tactical medic teams, and local emergency manager, his career has spanned operational, policy-making, and advisory roles from the local firehouse to the White House. In the aftermath of 9/11, he helped establish the Arlington County (VA) Office of Emergency Management, which was a finalist for a Harvard University Ash Institute Innovations in American Government Award. Dr. Stern helped lead incident management teams to Hurricanes Charley in Florida (2004) and Katrina in New Orleans (2005) and supported medical relief efforts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after the 2010 earthquake that claimed nearly 300,000 lives. After Hurricane Katrina, he was selected as a White House Fellow, a non-partisan leadership development program, serving for a year as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in the Secretary’s Office of Law Enforcement, Security, and Emergency Management, and was later part of a handpicked team assigned to write the president’s 2007 National Strategy for Homeland Security at the White House Homeland Security Council. He was then appointed by the president as Executive Director of the Homeland Security Advisory Council at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he also coordinated all interaction with the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (the Graham-Talent Commission). He received an outstanding service award from the Secretary of Homeland Security for his work. Later, he led the policy analysis division for DHS’s federally-funded research development center, the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, where he led wide-ranging analytic projects in support of FEMA, the DHS Office of Science and Technology, the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, the DHS Office of Policy, the National Guard Bureau, and the Department of State Bureau of Counterterrorism. Dr. Stern has a Ph.D. in Public Administration/Public Affairs from Virginia Tech’s Center for Public Administration and Policy, an M.P.A. from the American University School of Public Affairs, and a B.A. in government from the College of William & Mary. He is a Certified Emergency Manager through the International Association of Emergency Managers and an Executive Fire Officer through the National Fire Academy. Dr. Stern has written and lectured extensively on disaster management, first response, and homeland security; contributed to several after action reports in the aftermath of critical incidents, including the 1997 B’nai B’rith anthrax incident and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and authored chapters for the International City/County Management Association’s Managing Fire and Emergency Services and the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis’ Handbook of Critical Incident Analysis. He has served in advisory roles as a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University and as an adviser to the board of directors of the Committee for Tactical Emergency Casualty Care, and currently is a member of The InterAgency Board’s Strategic Planning Group, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s FirstNet Public Safety Advisory Committee, the National Homeland Security Consortium, the National Emergency Management Association’s Homeland Security Committee, the National Capital Region Urban Area Security Initiative Senior Policy Group, and co-chair of the Virginia Fusion Center Advisory Board.