Meghan McPherson
Pracademic Affairs Co-Director
Meghan McPherson is the Director of Emergency Management Education, Training, and Exercises for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. In this role, Meghan leads the development, planning, and execution of a robust training and exercise program across the health system. McPherson is a seasoned emergency manager with over two decades of experience in the field. Most recently, she served as the Director of Emergency Management for Mount Sinai Queens Hospital on the front lines of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to joining the Mount Sinai Health System, Meghan was Assistant Director of the Center for Health Innovation (CHI) at Adelphi University, served as the program coordinator for emergency management graduate programs, and concentrated her work on community-based social resilience initiatives. Preceding her work at Adelphi, Meghan spent four years as both the Grants Manager and the Energy Assurance Program Manager in the Governor’s Office of Energy and Planning in New Hampshire. While in this position, she supported the State Emergency Operations Center during disasters by ensuring the continuity of the state’s energy supply. She also worked for James Lee Witt Associates in Washington, DC, and deployed multiple times to Louisiana to support recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina.
Meghan serves on the University of Southern California Emergency Management program faculty, where she also participated in curriculum and course development. She previously wrote the curriculum for the MPS in Emergency Management and served as adjunct faculty at Tulane University’s Emergency and Security Studies graduate programs.
Meghan is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), Certified National Healthcare Disaster Professional (NHDP-BC), and Certified Healthcare Provider Continuity Professional (CHPCP). She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Pracademic Affairs journal. She is also a member of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security Executive Leaders Program Cohort 2102. Meghan earned her BA in political science at the University of New Hampshire and her Master of Public Policy (MPP) with a concentration in national security policy from The George Washington University.
Dr. Michael Wallace
Pracademic Affairs Co-Director
Michael Wallace, Ed.D., is the Director of the Emergency and Security Studies program and a senior professor of practice at Tulane University. He’s a retired military intelligence officer with 20 years of active service, with military assignments including Naval Special Warfare, Defense Human Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Post-military, he worked as a senior intelligence analyst in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate.
Dr. Wallace has experience in counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, special warfare, and intelligence collection and analysis. He is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, holds an MLA from Tulane University, an MMAS in Military History from the US Army Command and General Staff College, and a Doctorate in Education from the University of Alabama. Dr. Wallace is also an adjunct professor at the Naval War College.
Jennifer Harper Myers
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Ms. Harper Myers retired in July 2022 as the Director for the NH Department of Safety, Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM). Ms. Harper Myers was Governor Sununu’s designated Homeland Security Advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Ms. Harper Myers career in state service spanned 35 years, in which she served as the HSEM Assistant Director, Operations Chief, Co-Director of the NH Department of Safety’s Information and Analysis Center, HSEM Bioterrorism Coordinator, HSEM Exercise Training Officer and HSEM Terrorism Coordinator. She was an Adjunct Professor at Plymouth State University for 4 years teaching Homeland Security in the Criminal Justice Program.
Ms. Harper Myers was instrumental with assisting first responders, communities, state agencies and private sector partners with grants, planning, training and exercise opportunities to ensure their readiness and coordination efforts to respond to disasters and emergency incidents. Ms. Harper Myers holds a Master’s Degree in Homeland Security and Defense from the Naval Postgraduate School, a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Southern NH University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management from Franklin Pierce College and an Associate’s Degree in Business Science from Hesser College.
Bradley Hubbard
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Bradley R. Hubbard serves as the Emergency Response Manager for Shell USA in the Gulf of Mexico. In this role, Brad leads all-hazard programs for emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and security for offshore operations and supporting logistics infrastructure. Hubbard has experience across a broad range of energy sector operations, including upstream, downstream, maritime, transportation and renewable energy. Hubbard also provides on-site incident management for Shell assets around the world. Brad’s energy sector experience includes in-country emergency management support in over a dozen countries across the globe. Hubbard sits on numerous industry committees for emergency response in the energy and oil & gas sector, including American Petroleum Institute (API), Offshore Operators Committee (OOC) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
Brad earned a B.S. in Crisis and Disaster Management & an M.S. in Occupational Safety Management; both from the University of Central Missouri. Brad is a proud alumnus of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a program at Harvard University.
Prior to joining Shell, Bradley worked in the municipal Fire/EMS service as a Lieutenant/Firefighter & EMT; and has maintained his Emergency Medical Technician status since 2002. Hubbard worked as a dispatcher for a county based, multi-agency, 911 dispatch/communications center. Additionally, he worked for the Institute for Rural Emergency Management (IREM) providing emergency management consultancy for the public & private sectors in rural communities.
Steve Recca
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Steve Recca directs the University and Agency Partnership Program for the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Center for Homeland Defense and Security, and concurrently serves as the Humanitarian Assistance Program Advisor with the Pacific Disaster Center. Steve’s previous positions include security policy assignments with the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, Department of Defense, and in academia. He teaches Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Human Security courses at the University of Denver, University of Colorado, and University of Alaska, and is a Trustee for Marian University. Steve also is on the Review Boards for three additional peer-reviewed journals: Homeland Security Affairs, Journal of Human Security and Resilience, and the International Journal of Security, Preparedness, and Resilience Education.
Dr. Rebecca Rouse
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Rebecca (Becky) Rouse is a Professor of Practice and Associate Director for the Emergency and Security Studies program in Tulane University’s School of Professional Advancement. She retired from the US Army after nearly 22 years as a Military Police Officer, Assistant Professor, and commander’s speechwriter. She further served the DOD by facilitating tabletop exercises and the Defense Support of Civil Authorities Executive Seminar. Becky taught and developed curriculum for university-level classrooms and online since 1994 — and served as a training specialist in the FEMA Incident Workforce Academy. Becky earned a DM in Homeland Security, an MA in Political Science, a grad cert in Homeland Defense, and a BS in Criminal Justice.
Monica C. Sanders
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Monica Sanders makes a practice of looking into chaos to find justice. Her academic and entrepreneurial practices focus on disasters, climate change and humanitarianism. She looks for ways to leverage technology to help the most vulnerable among us to be noticed and served in our increasingly digital world. As a New Orleans native her life, like many, was bifurcated by Hurricane Katina and the injustices it revealed. That helped illuminate the need to view both climate change and digital issues through the lens of equity, inclusion and how we can improve those outcomes.
Professor Sanders founded “The Undivide Project,” an organization dedicated to creating climate resilience in divested communities via Internet infrastructure and service-centered digital solutions. She holds faculty appointments at the Georgetown University Law Center, The Earth Commons at Georgetown University and is a fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Professor Sanders is a nationally recognized expert in the field, having been a part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committees, and being a part of the inaugural class of the FEMA Vanguard Fellows Program. She is also a National Preparedness Month spokesperson, where she does media messaging around preparedness and risk reduction in partnership with the American Red Cross, Clorox, and FEMA.
Professor Sanders’ prior experience includes serving as a Senior Committee Counsel for both the House of Representatives and Senate Committees on Homeland Security. In those roles, she focused on oversight of disaster response and recovery programs, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure protection. She also served as the Senior Legal Advisor for International Response and Programs at the American Red Cross, and as an attorney for the Small Business Administration during the Hurricane Maria and western wildfire responses. Professor Sanders also studied security and defense–civilian coordination in emergencies as part of the European Union Visitor’s Program and remains actively involved in crisis and resilience work as part of UNDRR, Red de Mujeres en Desastres and several other networks.
Samantha Twiggs
Pracademic Affairs Review Board Member
Ms. Samantha Twiggs is originally from Missoula, Montana, where she studied Political Science and Global Public Health, and participated in the Peace Corps Prep Program at the University of Montana from 2014 to 2017. During her undergraduate studies, she initiated an independent research project on the correlation between chemical pesticides and epigenetic changes in ruminant species, which received recognition from Yale University and the Department of the Army. Samantha was also involved in efforts to establish international consensus on environmental law and environmental criminal law through the London Zoological Society and the United Nations World Heritage Congress. In May of 2020, she completed her graduate studies in Criminal Justice, Public Administration, Homeland Defense and Emergency Management, and National Intelligence Studies at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS).
In 2018, Samantha participated in the NORAD and USNORTHCOM Volunteer Student Internship Program (VSIP), where she served as the Deputy VSIP Coordinator. After completing her internship with NORAD and USNORTHCOM, she worked as the Contract Manager for the Policy, Security and Analysis Branch of Analytic Services (ANSER), and then as a Tabletop Exercise (TTX) and Defense Support of Civil Authorities Executive Seminar (DSCA ES) Specialist for Strategic Enterprise Support Services (SE2S). Ms. Twiggs has been in government service since 2019 and has held roles such as the North American Defense and Security Academic Alliance (NADSAA) Program Manager, the Director of Operations for the Homeland Defense Institute, and her most recent position as a Wargame Operations Specialist, wherein she served as the project lead for the VISTA GLADIATOR Wargame series. Ms. Twiggs also served as the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) advisor for the Joint Training, Exercise, and Wargame Directorate, a Sentinel for NORAD and USNORTHCOM, and is a certified Expert Associate Leadership Coach.
