Rate My Professor Anne-Lise Velez

Dr. Anne-Lise Velez serves as Collegiate Associate Professor in the Virginia Tech Honors College and affiliated faculty with the School of Public and International Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in Public Administration, a Master’s in Public Administration, and a Master’s in Architecture from North Carolina State University, complemented by a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech. This diverse educational foundation underpins her commitment to transdisciplinary research, focusing on public and nonprofit management, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and decision-making processes at the nexus of public and nonprofit sectors. Her work particularly addresses environmental and urban policy issues related to community wellbeing, sustainability, community capacity building, representation in disaster response, and cultural resource preservation. She collaborates with multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional teams on complex problems crossing disciplinary boundaries.

Prior to her current role, Velez was assistant collegiate faculty at Virginia Tech, a postdoctoral associate at the university’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. In teaching, she leads transdisciplinary SuperStudio courses, instructs on environmental policy and transdisciplinary research methods within the Honors College, and teaches STEM-H graduate students through the +Policy Network’s Science, Technology & Engineering in Policy (STEP) graduate certificate. Notable publications encompass “The structure of effective governance of disaster response networks: Insights from the field” (2018, The American Review of Public Administration, 261 citations), “What information do people use, trust, and find useful during a disaster? Evidence from five large wildfires” (2015, Natural Hazards, 202 citations), “Pathways of representation in network governance: evidence from multi-jurisdictional disasters” (2021, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 56 citations), “Co-management during crisis: insights from jurisdictionally complex wildfires” (2022), and “Public information seeking, place-based risk messaging and wildfire preparedness in southern California” (2017, International Journal of Wildland Fire). With over 900 citations on Google Scholar, her research significantly impacts fields of disaster management, network governance, and policy engagement. Velez also leads Policy Camp initiatives for researcher policy training and co-curated exhibitions “unEarthed” and “Second Nature/PolliNATION” presented at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025.