National Advisory Committee on Windstorm Impact 

Reduction (NACWIR) Member 

 

Walter G. Peacock, Ph.D. 

Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban 

Planning and the Sustainable Coastal Margins Program

Director, Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center Bryan and 

Sandy Mitchell Master Builder Chair College of Architecture

Texas A&M University 

Dr. Peacock is a professor of urban planning with expertise in 

natural hazard mitigation and adaptation, and long-term disaster 

recovery. While his disaster expertise is broad, he has significant 

experience with the study of human behavior and social systems in 

relation to hurricanes. For example, he has examined post-hurricane 

housing recovery, coastal community hazard mitigation planning, and incentive programs for 

wind hazard retrofitting by homeowners. 

He is a faculty member in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and 

the Director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University, where he 

has been a member of the faculty since 2002. He received his PhD in Sociology from the 

University of Georgia. He is internationally known for his research on disaster recovery, 

community resiliency, and social vulnerability. He was awarded the Quarantelli Award for 

Social Science Disaster Theory in 2009 acknowledging significant theoretical work in disaster 

and hazards research. In 2012 he was awarded the Sandy and Bryan Mitchell Master Builder 

Endowed Chair and in 2014 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Research from 

Texas A&M.

He has conducted research in Florida, Texas, California, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, the former 

Yugoslavia, Italy, Turkey, and India. He has been the principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI on 

dozens of research grants to examine community resilience and disaster recovery. He is 

currently the Social Science Team Leader for the NIST Center of Excellence for Risk-Based 

Community Resilience Planning. 

Dr. Peacock has authored or co-authored over 100 articles, book chapters, books, research 

monograph and technical reports. His hazards and disaster related articles have appeared in 

journals such as the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, Natural Hazards 

Review, Natural Hazards, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, Risk Analysis, and Disasters. 

He has co-authored three books. His first, entitled Living Conditions, Disasters and 

Development, provides a set of standardized measures for assessing the impact of and recovery 

from disasters based on household living conditions that can be employed cross-nationally and 

cross-culturally. His second book, entitled Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the 

Sociology of Disasters, documents the impacts and early recovery efforts from Hurricane 

Andrew in South Florida. In his most recent co-authored book, Planning for Community 

Resilience, describe an inclusive planning process for creating disaster-resilient communities. 

Based on their recovery work after Hurricane Ike in Galveston, Texas and hazard mitigation 

planning work among coastal communities, they developed a blueprint for community based 

resiliency planning. This work can guide any community through the process of determining 

their level of hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability and offers a 

portfolio of planning tools and strategies with the goal of promoting disaster resilient 

communities. 
He has given briefings regarding household, housing, and community recovery following major 

natural disasters to local, state, and federal officials. Examples include speaking on Capitol Hill 

addressing housing recovery issues, serving on an expert team assembled by the National 

Academies of Science investigating housing and housing assistance, consulting for the 

Governmental Accountability Office on housing rebuilding and recovery issues, and speaking on 

a National Academies of Science panel on community resiliency and disaster recovery. He 

addressed the National Science Board, governing council for the NSF, regarding the need for 

research on long-term recovery following hurricanes. He described the outcome of social 

science research which suggests that our nation’s reliance on market-based approaches, while 

effective in many ways, systematically fails to ensure broad-based recovery, particularly housing 

recovery for renters, minorities and low-income households. He also described the need to better 

understand the social structures and processes generating vulnerability to hurricanes and other 

disasters in the first place if we are to become a more disaster resilient nation.