Dr. Dean Kyne is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and Full Professor and Director of the Disaster Studies Program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in disaster management, resilience, sustainability, GIS, and sociology, and has helped establish the Disaster Studies Program as one of the university’s signature interdisciplinary graduate programs. His research focuses on disaster and emergency management, community resilience, sustainability, environmental social science, social capital, disaster preparedness, and evacuation. His work has been widely published in leading peer-reviewed journals and has informed both scholarship and disaster policy. Dr. Kyne earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Social Science from Arizona State University, a Master of Public Administration from Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Professional Studies from Cornell University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Karlsruhe University in Germany. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Arizona State University. His honors include the 2025 CLA Faculty Excellence Award in Research, designation as a Fulbright Scholar by the U.S. Department of State (2020), and the 2019 Dr. Tom Phelan Award from FEMA’s Emergency Management Higher Education Symposium for advancing emergency management education.