Summit convened by:

Center for Biosecurity of UPMC

Canadian Policy Research Network

Center for Science Technology and Security Policy at AAAS

National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responsed to Terror

Arrietta Chakos

Professional Biography
Arrietta Chakos is Assistant City Manager in Berkeley, California. Her responsibilities include managing the city’s intergovernmental relations, community partnerships, and hazard mitigation efforts.  She works with Berkeley’s state and federal legislators on policy and funding matters and coordinates partnerships with the University of California, Berkeley as well as other local and regional institutions. She worked on the city’s recent 15-year land use plan with the UC Berkeley campus that yielded a record fiscal agreement.

As a seismic safety advocate, Ms. Chakos has worked since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to improve local and regional disaster readiness. Prior to her work with the city, Ms. Chakos was the legislative liaison for the Berkeley Unified School District, where she coordinated advocacy efforts with state legislators to provide funding for the building and repair of seismically resistant schools. Further, she coordinated election efforts to successfully raise local taxes to fund the retrofit of municipal and school buildings in Berkeley.

Ms. Chakos has worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services on hazard mitigation projects. She has secured project funding from these partner agencies and others for many seismic safety retrofit projects. She has served as a technical advisor on panels for FEMA and for its report to the Congress on mitigation funding; GeoHazards International; the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); the World Bank; the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services; the Association of Bay Area Governments; the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; and Cornell University, as well as on city commissions and university task forces dealing with seismic safety and hazard mitigation issues.

She has been an invited speaker at the Disasters Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences; the 2006 commemoration conference on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the Natural Hazards’ Center annual conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder; numerous U.S./Japan technical workshops, including serving as a delegate for the U.S. at federally convened conferences between the two nations and at the UN hazards conference commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Kobe earthquake.

Publications include papers on disaster issues for numerous technical conferences on disaster risk reduction; for the American Society of Civil Engineers; for Spectra, an engineering professional publication; for the “Natural Hazards’ Observer”; and in the OECD book, Keeping Schools Safe in Earthquake Country; and a contribution to the UN book on hazards, Living with Risk.