Senior Resilience and S&T Policy Advisor, Consultant
Mr. David Kerner's expertise lies in science and technology policy, sustainable energy policies and practices, functional needs and alternatives analyses, and technical requirements development. He has worked on a holistic, functionally-oriented approach to understanding resilience within social-ecological systems. He has over 35 years of experience supporting the U.S. government in assessing the tradeoffs between expected benefits and unforeseen costs of technology choices; the ideation of novel technical solutions to seemingly intractable problems; combatting weapons of mass destruction; detecting landmines; developing strategic energy strategies; and deploying renewable technologies. He has also advised state-level government on the use and drawbacks of computer, advanced, and intermediate technologies.
Key research Interests: Resilience attributes, resilience assessments, managing for resilience, breaking the efficiency paradigm
If resilience theory is to be of practical value for policy makers and resource managers, the theory must be translated into sensible decision-support tools. We present a set of resilience attributes, developed to characterize human-managed systems, that helps system stakeholders make practical use of resilience concepts in tangible applications. These resilience terms can facilitate the modeling of resilience behavior within systems, as well as support those lacking access to sophisticated models. Our goal is to empower policy makers and resource managers to put resilience theory to work in the real world.
