Dan Flynn, CEM, MEP is an Emergency Management Consultant, Federal Responder and Subject Matter Expert. He serves as a Mass Fatality responder and Instructor for Kenyon International. Dan is a former Emergency Manager for Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management in California. He serves as the Disaster Response Director for the Central U.S. for Rotary International and is on the International Executive Committee for Rotary’s worldwide disaster response efforts. He served as the National Disaster Response Director for Sheep Dog Impact Assistance. Dan holds the prestigious Master Exercise Practitioner designation through FEMA and is an Instructor for several member agencies of the National Disaster Preparedness Consortium. He is a Subject Matter Expert for the American Nurses’ Association for their National Healthcare Disaster Certification program. He did his Master’s level work in the Sociology of Disasters. Dan started his Emergency Response/Management career nearly 40 years ago with the U.S. Coast Guard, working in Search and Rescue, Law Enforcement and Marine Safety. He served 5 years with FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue team, MO Task Force 1 and 17 years with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ mass fatality team, DMORT VII, serving as an Autopsy Tech, a HAZMAT Specialist and Trainer. Dan was the Emergency Response Team Manager for Recon Solutions. During the 2004-2005 Hurricane seasons, Dan and his team the first “boots on the ground” at nearly a dozen hurricanes, assisting with state, county and local responses along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines. He has served on the Command and General Staff of several Type 1 disaster responses including tornados, floods, oil spills and large-scale animal disease epidemics. He is a certified Fire Service Instructor, a FEMA NIMS, CERT and HERT Instructor and has delivered over 10,000 hours of training for federal, state, NGO, Healthcare and Private Sector organizations.

Oceana Francis is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a joint appointment in Sea Grant College Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). She is a licensed civil engineer in both Alaska and Hawaii. Her professional engineering work includes built infrastructure projects and extreme environments such as coastal, offshore, and permafrost. Notably, this includes working on many rural infrastructure projects under Senator Ted Stevens’ administration in Alaska; the relocation of villages due to climate change and ocean hazards; and the decommissioning of outdated systems and strategic reconfiguration of new electrification replacements for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). She has organized two offshore expeditions in the Alaska region and three offshore expeditions in the Hawaii region with the goal of studying local sea wave (SW) conditions. Her most recent Arctic work includes optimizing the rheology in sea ice models. In parallel, she has also been involved in studying the oceanic processes in the Hawaii and North Pacific regions, such as the projection of the extreme wave climate in the North Pacific Ocean; coastal exposure of the Hawaiian Islands; and assessing vulnerability and risk to ecosystems, built infrastructure and societies and the feasibility of implementing different engineered adaptations. This has led to work on high-visibility projects on coastal hazards for the State of Hawaii and Hawaii’s counties. She is currently serving as editor for American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.

Suzanne Frew leads The Frew Group, https://thefrewgroup.com, a federally certified, small woman-owned consultancy based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that supports government, academia, and businesses to create inclusive, culturally competent emergency management plans, communications, and trainings and exercises. A recognized leader on equity and inclusion in the practitioner community, Frew brings 30 years of public and private sector experience operationally applying a lens of equity to meet legal mandates and ensure outreach and services are provided to the whole community, particularly disproportionately impacted populations. She specializes in the impacts of climate change on diverse, highly vulnerable populations (e.g., AFN, undocumented, LGBTQI, unhoused), community resilience building, risk communications, cross-cultural communications, marginalized racism, and support for people with disabilities, access, and functional needs in her work as a consultant, conference speaker, trainer, and as a coauthor or contributing author to four risk communications/emergency management books and numerous professional articles. Her work takes her throughout the United States, Canada, Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Caribbean. She serves as the liaison between the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) Emerging Technology Committee and the IAEM Diversity Committee. Suzanne began her career serving FEMA full time in public information, hazard mitigation, and public-private partnerships. She holds an MFA and BA.