Walter Peacock

Walter Gillis Peacock conducts research on urban planning, sustainability and resiliency issues, natural hazards, hazards mitigation and adaptation, long-term disaster recovery and quantitative methods. He is internationally known for his research on disaster recovery, community resiliency and social vulnerability. He has conducted research in Florida, Texas, California, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, the former Yugoslavia, Italy, Turkey and India. He is professor of urban planning in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2002. He is currently program director of the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) in the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Until the summer of 2019 he was director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. In 2009, he was awarded the Quarantelli Award for Social Science Disaster Theory, acknowledging significant theoretical work in disaster and hazards research. Between 2008 and 2012, he was the holder of the Rodney L. Dockery Endowed Professorship in Housing and the Homeless and in 2012, he was awarded the Sandy and Bryan Mitchell Master Builder Endowed Chair at Texas A&M. In 2014, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Research from Texas A&M, an award sponsored by the Association of Former Students. He has been PI or co-PI on approximately $7 million in external funding since joining Texas A&M, with the majority of that funding coming from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). He has authored or co-authored three books and over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, research monographs and professional papers. He has given briefings regarding household, housing and community recovery following major natural disasters to local, state and federal officials. He is a professor in the School of Architecture's Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, and senior research fellow with the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M. He earned a BA in sociology from Columbus State University and an MA and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Georgia.