Christine A. Bevc is a research associate with the North Carolina Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center (NCPERRC), working on the NCPERRC Regional Project. She uses her expertise in social networks and social science research methods to better understand the organizational partnerships of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery. She also assists with the design, collection, management, and analysis of data related to project activities.
Christine joins the NCPERRC from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she recently earned a PhD in sociology. She completed a MA in applied sociology and a BS in liberal studies (with minors in health sciences, environmental studies, and sociology) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. While in Colorado, she worked as a research assistant for the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center on projects including the Department of Homeland Security’s collaborative Center of Excellence grant on the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and the National Science Foundation’s Information Technology Research grant on Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE).
Her research broadly focuses on environmental sociology, sociology of disasters, organizational behavior, human spatial behavior, and research methods, including social network analysis and geographic information science. More specifically, her work includes emergency preparedness and response, social networks of organizational collaboration, long-term community disaster recovery, environmental justice, and military in disasters. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Environment and Behavior, and Disasters, as well as chapters in The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe.
In addition to her work with NCPERRC, Christine also contributes to the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Task Force on Hurricane Katrina and Rebuilding the Gulf Coast’s longitudinal study on community recovery. She currently serves on the executive council for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environment and Technology and the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Social Science.