Patrick Roberts

Patrick S. Roberts is a political scientist with a focus on public management and the policy process. He has substantive expertise in homeland security, nonproliferation, intelligence and national security, disaster risk, and emergency management. His work helps organizations improve decision-making through collaborative and evidence-based processes, and to navigate risk under conditions of uncertainty.

Roberts is the author of Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected (Cambridge, 2013). He has published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals. His research has been funded by: the National Science Foundation; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the United States Naval Laboratories; the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the Social Science Research Council. He serves on the editorial board of Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy. 

Roberts is an associate professor at Virginia Tech. He served as a foreign policy advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, funded by a Council on Foreign Relations Stanton International Affairs Fellowship. He has also been the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Germany. 

He holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Virginia. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and another at the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University.