Speakers Module

Monica Sanders makes a practice of looking into chaos to find justice. Her academic and entrepreneurial practices focus on disasters, climate change and humanitarianism. She looks for ways to leverage technology to help the most vulnerable among us to be noticed and served in our increasingly digital world. As a New Orleans native her life, like many, was bifurcated by Hurricane Katina and the injustices it revealed. That helped illuminated the need to view both climate change and digital issues through the lens of equity, inclusion and how we can improve those outcomes. 

Professor Sanders founded “The Undivide Project”, an organization dedicated to creating climate resilience in divested communities via Internet infrastructure and service-centered digital solutions. She also holds a faculty appointment at the Georgetown University Law Center, manages a program focused on environmental justice and resilience, and is a senior fellow at the Tulane University Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. Professor Sanders is a nationally recognized expert in the field, having been a part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committees, and being a part of the inaugural class of the FEMA Vanguard Fellows Program. She is also a National Preparedness Month spokesperson, where she does media messaging around preparedness and risk reduction in partnership with the American Red Cross, Clorox, and FEMA.

Professor Sanders’ prior experience includes serving as a Senior Committee Counsel for both the House of Representatives and Senate Committees on Homeland Security. In those roles, she focused on oversight of disaster response and recovery programs, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure protection. She also served as the Senior Legal Advisor for International Response and Programs at the American Red Cross, and as an attorney for the Small Business Administration during the Hurricane Maria and western wildfire responses. Professor Sanders also studied security and defense–civilian coordination in emergencies as part of the European Union Visitor’s Program and remains actively involved in crisis and resilience work as part of UNDRR, Red de Mujeres en Desastres and several other networks.