During August’s National Emergency Awareness Month, UH’s emergency management team is conducting an awareness and advocacy campaign to promote the capabilities of UH’s emergency management and the role of emergency managers.
Emergency managers are problem solvers - the ones you call 24/7/365 when an incident requires coordination across multiple services, agencies, or disciplines, even beyond traditional public safety. We help the UH community understand our risk, build resilience, navigate crises, and know what to do when disaster strikes. We are UH’s chief risk advisors, helping UH prevent, mitigate, prepare for, and recover from disasters. We always know who to call, we anticipate the needs, and we are never surprised by the phrase “this is unprecedented.” We are ready. We are disaster professionals, bridging gaps between UH, agencies, businesses, and communities to build resilience. We connect resources, foster collaboration, and ensure that when crises happen, response efforts are seamless and effective.
What is Emergency Management?
Emergency management ensures communities and organizations are prepared to respond to and recover from emergencies and disasters by creating, coordinating, and managing systems that save lives, minimize damage to property and infrastructure, mitigate future risks, and restore communities and organizations post-disaster.
Emergency management is a critical function that identifies, assesses, and mitigates risks to ensure community and organizational resilience. It leads crisis preparedness, response coordination, and recovery efforts by working across disciplines, sectors, and jurisdictions.
I joined UH as Director of Emergency Management to serve the UH community by leveraging my experience, contacts and skills. I hope to positively impact the UH community by strengthening UH’s preparedness and resilience regarding crises we will face.
What’s important to me is that UH’s students, employees, and guests are prepared for the next emergency, and that we’re all able to make it through any crisis safely. The UH administration across all 10 campuses and throughout the state feel the same way.
Emergency managers like me seek to promote safer, less vulnerable communities with the capacity to cope with hazards and disasters by coordinating and integrating all activities necessary to build, sustain, and improve the capability to mitigate against, prepare for, respond to, and recover from threatened or actual disasters and crises.
UH has been very active in our emergency management training, preparation and activities. The preparation never ends, but the state-wide June 2025 Makani Pahili exercise, for example, brought UH together with emergency management professionals across the state to practice the before, during, and aftermath of a category five hurricane. More recently, UH’s response to the 8.8 magnitude earthquake at Kamchatka Russia on July 29, 2025, and subsequent tsunami brought our community together to safeguard our community and communicate up-to-date information to help withstand tsunami threats and build resiliency from future tsunamis. While you may not be aware UH Emergency Management is striving to increase UH’s safety, we are working to support the UH community daily. Our goal is to directly impact the UH community to get through emergencies together. We don’t have emergency activation days every day, but when we do, like on July 29, we responded effectively. By “we” I mean UH and all of the many community partners we work with.
UH Emergency Management has many challenges – notably we never know when/what the next emergency will be. That’s especially true this time of year – hurricane season. But each critical incident or threat we allows us to learn more about preparing properly for the next emergency. I remember once leaving on a two-day trip which got extended to three weeks because I needed to respond to an emergency. Now I always have a “go bag” packed so I can run out the door with enough supplies to last throughout a critical incident.
As the UH Director of Emergency Management for the UH system, I am here to support the students, faculty, employees and guests of UH to prepare for, safely get through, and recover from emergencies. My top priorities are your safety and our collective resilience. Thanks for also making these your priorities by working together with our aloha spirit.