Biography
Eric Best is an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security and Public Policy at Penn State Harrisburg. He received his Ph.D. in Disaster Science and Management from the University of Delaware. His research interests include using statistics, GIS, and data science tools to create new applications for hazard reduction, evacuation modeling, and public policy analysis.
Prior to joining Penn State Harrisburg, Eric was an Assistant Professor of Emergency Management at Jacksonville State University, then an Assistant Policy Scientist at the Center for Applied Demography & Survey Research and an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy.
Research Interests
- Quantitative Social Science
- Hazard Reduction and Evacuation Modeling
- Spatial Statistics
Publications
Best, Eric. 2017. “Development of Hybrid Notification Systems for Use with Storm-Based Warnings in Rural Communities.” Natural Hazards Review 18(4) November 2017
El-Tawil, Sherif, Jieshi Fang, Benigno Aguirre, Eric Best. 2017. “A Computational Study of the Station Nightclub Fire Accounting for Social Relationships.” Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 20(4): 1-10
Greer, Alex and Eric Best. 2016. “Size Doesn’t Matter: The Complicated Relationship Between National Offshore Oil Spill Events, Framing, and Policy.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 34(1): 25-46
Best, Joel and Eric Best. 2016. “The Shifting Landscape for Student Loans.” Society, 53(1): 51-55
Best, Joel and Eric Best. 2014. The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem. University of California Press, May 2, 2014
Hotchkiss, H. L., B.E. Aguirre, Eric Best. 2013. “A Critique of the NIST Report of the Evacuation of the WTC Towers: Continued Doubts.” Disasters, 37(4): 695-704
Best, Eric. 2012. “Debt and the American Dream.” Society, 49(4): 349-352
Aguirre, B.E., Sherif El-Tawil, Eric Best, Kimberly Gill, Vladimir Fedorov. 2011. “Contributions of Social Science to Agent Based Models of Building Evacuation.” Contemporary Social Science, 6(3): 415-432
Education
B.S., M.A., Ph.D. University of Delaware