Ph.D. in government, University of Virginia; M.A. in political science, Claremont Graduate University; B.A. in politics, University of Dallas
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More ExpertsPatrick S. Roberts is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, with a focus on public management and governance processes. He has substantive expertise in homeland security, intelligence and national security, cybersecurity, disaster risk, and emergency management. His work helps organizations to improve decisionmaking 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.
He has served as a senior 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.
Roberts 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.
Patrick S. Roberts, Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected, Cambridge University Press, 2013
Rosas, Etienne, Patrick S. Roberts, Andrew Lauland, Italo A. Gutierrez, and Blas Nuñez-Neto, "Assessing the impact of municipal government capacity on recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico," International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 61, 2021
Misra, Shalini, Matthew Rhodes, and Patrick Roberts, "The Ecology of Emergency Management Work in the Digital Age," Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 3(5), 2020
Kris Wernstedt, Patrick S. Roberts, Joseph Arvai, and Kelly Redmond, "How Emergency Managers (Mis?)Interpret Forecasts," Disasters , 43(1), 2019
Patrick S. Roberts and Jon Schmid, "Government‐led innovation acceleration: Case studies of US federal government innovation and technology acceleration organizations," Review of Policy Research, 39, 2022
Patrick S. Roberts and Robert P. Saldin, "Why Presidents Sometimes Do Not Use Intelligence Information," Political Science Quarterly, 131(4), 2017
Misra, Shalini, Patrick Roberts, and Matthew Rhodes, "Information Overload, Stress, and Emergency Managerial Thinking," International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 51, 2020
