Amber Silver, PhD

Dr. Amber Silver is currently an Assistant Professor for the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. She received her Ph.D. in Geography and Environmental Management from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her primary research interests focus on how individuals and groups make decisions before, during, and after high-impact weather. More specifically, she is interested in the roles that public attention, risk perception, and communication play in protective action decision making during extreme events. Her most recent research has focused on the ways that new technologies, including social media, influence how individuals obtain, interpret, and respond to official and unofficial warning information.

She has shared the findings of her research in local, national, and international conferences and symposiums, including The World Weather Open Science Conference, the American Meteorological Society’s annual conference, and the Association of American Geographer’s conference. Her research has also been published in related journals, including Meteorological Applications, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Amber has recently joined the communications task force of the High Impact Weather (HIWx) working group of the World Weather Research Programme of the World Meteorological Organization. This ten-year project aims to understand and improve the communication of weather information to different end-users in order to promote appropriate protective actions.

Other key areas of interest include the impact of environmental disasters on a sense of place and place attachment; the use of social media as a risk and crisis communications tool; and the role of new media in collective sense-making during and after a disaster.