Christina Finch currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Response Geospatial Office at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The RGO specializes in providing geospatial information that allows decision makers to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate all hazards. Christina previously managed the National Hurricane Program (NHP) at FEMA. She has more than fifteen years of experience in emergency management and has worked across the disaster life cycle (preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery) to inform data-driven decisions. Christina has specific expertise in hurricane planning, evacuation modeling, mitigation, disaster operations, geospatial technology, socioeconomic vulnerability, risk communication, and community resilience.
Christina earned an MS in geography from the University of South Carolina, and her academic research focused on the development of a composite metric of social vulnerability to identify spatial disparities in the ability to prepare, respond, cope, and recover from environmental hazards and disasters. Christina is passionate about addressing the gap between emergency management research and practice and developing the next generation of emergency managers.