Dr. Oluponmile Olonilua

Dr. Oluponmile Olonilua is a Professor of Emergency Management and Homeland Security/Public Administration at Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas. She has been teaching at TSU since 2009 and Emergency Management and Homeland Security (EMHS) courses since Fall 2011. Her research focuses mainly on hazard mitigation, specifically on public engagement, diversity, and risk management. On teaching, Oluponmile developed the Emergency Management and Homeland Security degree program at TSU. She also teaches in the Master of Public Administration program.

As a PhD candidate at TSU, she was part of the preliminary meetings to get HBCUs involved in the emergency management field and immediately after graduation in 2006, she was appointed as a member of the University Task Force to start the undergraduate degree program at TSU. Her article on developing an EMHS program at an HBCU was published in the special edition of the Journal of Emergency Management (JEM) in 2019. She is currently the coordinator of the EMHS undergraduate degree program, and she collaborates with FEMA, Red Cross, and other relevant organizations to help build the program to obtain internship and other learning activities for EMHS students at TSU.. The TSU program is one of the very few that combines both emergency management and homeland not just among HBCUs but nationwide. Classes are offered online to allow first responders and those already in the field to be a part of the program at TSU. Current and past students include veterans, and young people from all races. Dr. Olonilua has successfully taken TSU students to the DHS TableTop Exercise in San Antonio at the invitation of FEMA Higher Education.

Dr. Olonilua’s background in Urban Planning and Environmental policy makes her contribution very valuable in hazard mitigation planning and she has been involved in development of plans for hazard mitigation. She has published her papers in top journals in the field of Emergency Management including Journal of Emergency Management. She has presented her research in professional conferences of Political science, Public Administration, Planning, and Emergency Management. Olonilua is a regular reviewer for different peer reviewed journals including Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning, Journal of Public Management and Social Policy, Journal of Emergency Management, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and Disasters Journal. I have attended the International Association of Emergency Managers and I have been a certified floodplain emergency manager since 2011.

Dr. Olonilua is on the Board of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association and the current Chair for the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship Award (MFM), an award at the Natural Hazards annual Workshop in Broomfield, Colorado.