Mary Comerio is a professor of architecture, an architect, and a faculty researcher at IURD, whose areas of expertise include architecture, community design, housing, and disaster planning and recovery policy. Her 1998 book, Disaster Hits Home, with its exhaustive analysis of the challenges in post-disaster reconstruction, is widely acclaimed as a sobering assessment of the country's disaster recovery policy. Her honors include a 2003 award of the Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; appointment to the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment at the National Academy of Science in 1999; a 1997 Award for Excellence in Research by the Western States Seismic Policy Council; and an Award for Outstanding Leadership and Volunteer Service by the Center for Independent Living in 1992. She teaches in the areas of professional practice, project development, seismic and architectural design. Furthering her disaster-resistant universities initiative, Comerio is developing a systematic basis for estimating and understanding downtime in disaster planning and loss modeling.