Erica Kuligowski is a social research scientist who studies human behavior during emergencies and the performance of evacuation models in disasters . She currently works at the Engineering Lab of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducting research on fire disasters and leading the NIST Hurricane Maria Project . Erica Kuligowski grew up in Baltimore and Forest Hill , Maryland . She attended high school near a fire station and thought about becoming a firefighter . While attending a program at University of Maryland College Park for women in STEM , Kuligowski watched a demonstration on fire modeling which inspired her to pursue fire protection engineering . Kuligowski earned her B.S. in 2001 and M.S. in 2003 in Fire Protection Engineering from University of Maryland at College Park . She then went on to earn her PhD in Sociology from University of Colorado Boulder in 2011 . Her dissertation focused on the behavior of occupants and factors in decision making processes during the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center . Kuligowski currently works at National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) in the Engineering Lab as a research social scientist . Her work focuses on human behavior in response to emergency situations and currently conducts research for the Wildland-Urban Interface ( WUI ) Fire Group as well as serving as the Team Lead for the NIST Hurricane Maria Project . Recent work includes research into infrastructure failure during the hurricane , and what could be improved to increase resiliency in similar emergencies . For WUI , Kuligowski is working on a project to assess emergency communications during the Chimney Tops 2 Fire of November , 2016 . Previously , Kuligowski worked on three different NIST research teams including two years with the Community Resilience Group . Her work involved educating communities on how to build resiliency through the assessment of structures in terms of their social or economic importance . Kuligowski has also done research on fire emergency drills and responses , particularly regarding egress models . In 2010 , she published " A Review of Building Evacuation Models : 2nd Edition " which reviews different egress drills in order to decide which is appropriate for a given building or situation . Kuligowski was an editor for '' Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics '' ( Springer 2011 ) in addition to '' SFPE '' ( Society of Fire Protection Engineers ) '' Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering '' ( Springer 2016 ) . Her work also includes studies on the World Trade Center attack on September 11th . Her dissertation titled " Terror Defeated : Occupant Sensemaking , Decision-Making , and Protective Action in the 2001 World Trade Center Disaster " addresses pre-evacuation behavior and assessment during the largest building evacuation in history . In 2014 , Erica Kuligowski was awarded the Harry C. Bigglestone Award for a paper entitled " Predicting Human Behavior During Fires , " which discusses evacuation models and potential for improvement through analysis of occupant decision making . She won the award again in 2017 along with the group of researchers who published " Assessing the Verification and Validation of Building Fire Evacuation Models , " which outlines possible verification and validation tests as a means of determining the efficacy of evacuation models . From her work at NIST , she earned two US DOC Gold Medals for her research on evacuation during the 2001 World Trade Center disaster and emergency communication during the 2011 tornado in Joplin , Missouri .
2001 attack on the World Trade Center
September 11 attacks
Erica Kuligowski